Asus P3B-F and 160gb drive

[Photosytes]

I'm trying to build a computer for a family member (who just had hers fried) out of three old computers. I'm using her old harddrive that is loaded with XP, an Asus P3B-F motherboard with a 500mhz pIII processor, almost 700mb of ram and a 160gb hard drive.

I get to the menu of choosing which way to start up (since it's been restarted several times) and have tried to start it normally, which then does nothing. Start it in safe mode with and without command prompt and it starts to load up but freezes at the agp driver.

In the BIOS under Primary Master it states:
Cylinders 1024
Head 255
Sector 63
CHS Capacity 8422MB
Max. LBA Capacity 8422MB

Obviously not seeing much of the harddrive.

My question is.... what's the best way to resolve this issue without having to format the drive. Is there a work around? A bios update? Etc. Or is there another issue that I am overlooking?

 

[dallasjoh]

Moving a harddrive with the OS from one computer to another never really works unless the motherboards pretty much the same. In your case I am afraid the only way is to reinstall the OS and drivers for the current motherboard.

 

[Photosytes]

Okay, will the MB see the larger hard drive then? Or do I need to update the BIOS, use a smaller drive, etc?? I will reinstall everything but I'm worried that isn't really going to resolve my issue with the MB and a 160GB drive.

 

[GhislainG]

What BIOS revision? If it's too old, then you might need an alternate solution for the system to see the whole drive.

 

[Photosytes]

It's pretty old.

What kind of alternate solution do you recommend?

I would even be satisfied to be able to use the drive with only half of it usable. Right now Windows won't even load on the machine. It is freezing part way through the load.

 

[Photosytes]

Can I partition the drive? Make it appear as if it were two 80gb drives? Would that help? I guess the BIOS doesn't really care about those sorts of things, does it?

 

[GhislainG]

If you don't care about the whole disk size, then try reformatting the disk and reinstall XP. Hard drive manufacturers used to provide utilities to overcome the LBA limit, so you could try that alternative if such tools are available for your hard disk. Either way you'll have to reformat the drive. I haven't used a P3B-F for a very long time...

 

[Photosytes]

She doesn't care how fast it is, just that it will do email, word and a bit of internet. i guess I'll be reformatting the drive then. Oh well. I hope that works!

Thanks for the help. If it doesn't do it, I guess I'll be back for help.

Oh, the utilities you were mentioning, they are for the hard drive? Not the mb? Hmmm....

 

[GhislainG]

What hard drive are you using (make and model)? Several years ago, Ontrack Disk Manager and other similar tools sometimes had to be used when installing large drives on older systems.