hard drive issues

[buddajah]

the system / mobo :
p3 500

a-trend tac 6240 with award 2.0 bios r 2

the problem :

during boot up the sytem hang on the auto hard drive detection process.

the drive :
WD 1200BB-53CAA0

IS THERE SOME LIMIT TO WHAT MY BIOS CAN HANDLE ?

what would make a drive hang like that ?

it is an EIDE drive , any suggestions ?

[fancypiper]

I have a motherboard that only supports drives up to around 30 some GB and I had to put the jumper of a 40 gig drive to limit it's apparent size.

Try a google search for your mobo and look up the specs for it.

[trilarian]

Also check your manufactur's website....if they are half way responsible they will rewrite the bios to allow bigger drives. You will have to dl them to a disk and flash your eeprom. Sounds complicated, but its not. Usally they have good instructions with the download.

[zie]

I think the partition table is corrupted or something similar. This is a common problem if u have a win9x FAT32 partition. I beleive there is an option you can push into lilo to by pass this hard drive detection thing, but i don't know exactly how. If the problematic hard drive doesn't contain important data, then you can just start again from scratch.

[buddajah]

thanks for the input - i have been trying to get the atrend site but cannot get to it. it is :
http://www.atrend.com.tw/

all i ger it the PCBD error

all i know is that the drive hangs the bios during the auto detect process.

is there a 3rd party boot disk that will allow me to set it up after the system has booted ?

[buddajah]

just to let every one know -- it was a bios limitation that hung the bios. i picked up an ide controller and it detects the drives fine.

so there is a limit to how big a hard drive a bios can address an check with your mobo maker for the specs.