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Change Bios to see bigger hard drive?

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:48 am
by kvzjr
I have a compaq evo n800v that will only boot hard drives smaller than 8gb. These originally shipped with 20 to 60gb hard drives. I have reset CMOS and flashed the bios with the latest version. Still no change. Going into bios has very limited settings that can be changed. Nothing that would help see a bigger HD. I see that UBCD has different bios and cmos tools. Would any of them help me change the settings so that I can boot bigger drives. Thanks for any help.

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:47 pm
by Icecube
8.4-Gbyte Limitation

If your drive is larger than 8.4 Gbytes, the capacity may exceed the limits of your system BIOS and operating system. Most system BIOSs cannot support ATA drives this large. DOS and Windows operating systems limit the drive capacity to 8.4 Gbytes per physical drive and 2 Gbytes per partition. Because of these limitations, a 32-bit file allocation table (FAT32) is required to acheive full capacity of your drive, beyond 8.4 Gbytes. To acheive full capacity of your drive, you will need BIOS support for drives greater than 8.4 Gbytes and a Windows operating system that supports FAT32. This support is available by way of the following methods:
* A third party device driver, such as DiscWizard Starter Edition (DiscWizard Starter Edition is provided on the DiscWizard diskette included with your drive)
* An intelligent ATA Host Adapter
* A system BIOS upgrade
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/bioslmt.html
Originally the laptop is shipped with a preinstalled Windows XP with a single 30GB partition.
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home5/pg04876832/faq.html
So normally you can have 1 large partition. If you want to install 2 operating systems, the boot files must be in the first 8GB of your hard drive. Your normal files can be in an extended partition.

Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 4:40 am
by kvzjr
Thanks for the help. I'll see if I can get it working.