BIOS doesnt detect my 40Gb hdd full capacity

[tesa]

I have a motherboard made by pcchips... and the bios only detects up to 32Gb out of 40Gb of my hdd. I would like to have my hdd full capacity detected... Should I upgrade my Bios,?? what would happen if I format my hdd using only 32Gb??
thanks in advance for any tip
Tesa

 

[Jakespeare]

I would certainly look at the BIOS flash / update.

I would also read the information about the BIOS. Usually, (with name brand name boards, this is always) there is some information posted with the BIOS update that tells what the update corrects.

> YOu also ask:
what would happen if I format my hdd using only 32Gb??

I'm not sure. If I had too, I would use FDISK and PARTITION the Hard drive; I would use 75% & 25%, that way you would have a 30 GB & 10 GB partitions, and eliminate the possible catastrophic failure someday, where Windows just won't read the HD anymore.

> However, I think that you will probably get some other good info on this problem from successive posts.

> Last: Does the mainboard BIOS have the "Auto Detect" HD option ?
Does it also read 32 GB there ?

 

[Rhort]

Yup, a BI/OS upgrade is what you need there, Tesa. You da man, Jakespeare (again!)

Quite a few BI/OSes flake out about 32Gb; I just got a new mobo to go from Award 4.51PG to 6.0 so that it'd see my 40Gb drive. If you've got an IBM drive, there's a utility to get around it, but I'd say that an upgrade is still the way to go, because I would guess that might be a little unstable.

 

[fasttoon]

Hey tesa there are a couple of ways around this,

1. is to upgrade your bios as the other posters are suggesting. However it may not work in all cases.

2. use the installation program that came with the hard drive or if you don't have it (oem drives do not come with it) go to the mfg website and download it, the program is usually called EZ-bios and will fool your bios into letting you use your hard drive to the full capacity.

You question is what will happen if you format only 32mb? From my understanding of how things work it should do the trick, I like Jakespeares solution and it should work as well however I have not heard of it nor tried it.

Here's the reasoning, you bios controls the size of the HD, once you have reached the limit your bios will instruct the hard drive to start writing back at the beginning and overwrite what is there (usually the os is at the beginning), you might get a crash at this point, definitely a crash/no boot/faulty boot at next boot up. So if you only use 32gb or use multiple partitions that should satisfy the bios limitations. Can you use larger sizes than the bios limitation? Sure can! I have but be aware that its just a matter of time until your drive starts filling up and/or is really fragmented then overwriting files at the beginning of the drive is very possible, and its not worth it to take the chance.

Simplest, safest, fastest, easiest, cheapest way to go is with the hard drive installation software.