bois shows wrong size for hard drive

[etrix]

Hi all, My bios will only recognize 2012mb of my hd. I tried different hard drives same thing. When I tried it in my pc it says 6 gigs (which it is), but back in the other pc it says 2012.I tried auto and user defining the hd in the bios but it won't go over 2012. The bios is an AMI 8132 1999. This is a duron 950 on a Amptron mobo ver. 7.0a. I tried a disk manager but nothing. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanx

 

[Mulga]

Looks like you will need to get a BIOS upgrade. Go to the motherboard manufactures site and they should have flash upgrades available for download. It is vital that you get the upgrade for your EXACT model of motherboard and follow the manufacurers instructions as to doing the upgrade to the letter. All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

 

[etrix]

Thanx Mulga, I'll give it a try.

 

[rwise2112]

If a BIOS upgrade isn't available or does not help, you can consider getting a IDE controller card to install in a PCI slot. These usually have their own onboard BIOS and work with very large hard drives.

I used a Promise ATA100 controller, on an old IBM machine I have. It supports up to 128GB hard drives, and also will give ATA100 perfomance if you ever get such a drive. It will also work with you current IDE controllers enabled, so you gain an extra 2 IDE channels.

 

[etrix]

Thanx rwise2112, I'll look for a bios upgrade, if that doesn't help I'll get a IDE controller.
thanx again

 

[ceh4702]

some older computers have a BIOS limiting the harddrive to that size. This may be impossible to overcome with just the BIOS. It may be possible to use a program like EZ-Max to go around the bios to split the hard drive up into partitions that will work. Sometimes it is the OS and file system that is the problem. Win95 used that size of partition as the max and used a 16 bit file system. However, when Win95 Ver B came out it had large drive support option using FDISK for a 32 bit file system. I think it went to about 4 or 8 Gigs or something like that. There were still BIOS limits for different motherboards.

Some drives come with EZ-Max which is a utility I downloaded once from the Maxtor website in the support/downloads/utilities at their website. My last IBM Drive also had the same type of a program. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[etrix]

Thanx everyone, I tried DiskGo (like EZ-Max) that came with the Fujitsu drive and it would not work. When I would go to make the partitions it would give me the choice to make 1, 2, 3, etc, but would still read the wrong amount of drive space available. So when it would make the partitions they would be the wrong size. I don't know.