Bios not recognizing correct Hard Drive size

[HSE]

I have a 486DX, and it is supposed to accept hard drives up to 8 gig. When I plug in my 2.5 gig hard drive, the Bios recognizes everything about the hard drive except it only sees the hard drive as 425 Mb.

Please advise me on how to fix this problem.

Thanks.
HSE.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

What is the make and model of the motherboard?
What is the make and version of the BIOS?
What is the make and model of HDD?

If your BIOS does not have an auto-detect feature, you will need to enter information such as cyliners, heads and sectors manually into the BIOS.

I hope this helps - or that I can help you further.

 

[butchrecon]

A dynamic drive overlay will also help reconize the entire HDD. Who is the maker of the Hard Drive? With that info I can give you a link for a drive overlay.

Jim

 

[HSE]

The Motherboard is from: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. and is an VL/I-486SV2GX4.

The BIOS is the Award Modular BIOS make I486SV2G, ver 4.50G.

The Hard Drive is: Western Digital Caviar 32500, model: WDAC32500-23H.

 

[butchrecon]

The Western Digital Hard Drive should have come with a floppy disk. It has the Drive Overlay you need to get the Hard drive to recognize. If not go to their web site and get it. It is one of many programs you can use to show the entire drive on older controllers.

 

[NEMS]

Manually input the hard disk data into the bios. Use hard disk utility that come along with the hard disk. Your problem will be solved. Good luck
nems

 

[CitrixEngineer]

The Western Digital Ontrack software is fairly good, but won't necessarily work with Windows ME. You may also see MS-DOS compatibility mode issues with Windows 9x, depending on the version of Ontrack you have.

My preference would be to manually input the drive specification, since the board supports drives of that size. I would think, though, that the BIOS would support the Auto-detect feature. Try clearing the current drive settings and pressing the ? key.

If this doesn't work:

Western Digital are usually really good at providing all the necessary information on the disk itself, but, just in case, the settings are:

Cylinders : 4960
Heads : 16 (translation mode)
Sectors : 63

You don't need to enter any information in the Precompensation or Landing Zone fields, and Award BIOSes usually calculate the size from the given information.

Good Luck!

 

[rfeenie]

try the auto detection on LBA mode If in doubt get the Ball Pein Hammer out