Windows hangs with new HD

[Guest]

I just added a Maxtor DiamondMax 40 GB disk to my PC. My BIOS wouldn't autodetect it, but I used Maxtor's MaxBlast utility to get it up and running. Problem is: I can access the disk just fine when I boot in Safe Mode or in DOS, but NOT when I just let Win98 boot normally. If I try this, the PC freezes after processing autoexec.bat. Any ideas as to what may be causing this?

The drive has been formatted as a single 40 GB FAT32 partition, and it's set as the slave on my primary IDE (my other HD being the master). I tried removing my old HD and setting the new one as the master, but that didn't help either. Could my old i440LX motherboard (BIOS dated 1998) be a problem for large drives like this one? (If so, maybe I should just add another IDE controller?)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

- Tom

 

[bdaley]

Yeah, it might be the old BIOS. 40 GB drives were science fiction in 1998!

Is there a more recent BIOS version you can flash upgrade to?

But it's very odd that you can access the drive in Windows SM or DOS. I'm not sure what's going on there.

Does the MaxBlast disk include some sort of drive overlay utility which will allow the full capacity of the drive to be recognized? Is that how you got it running?

Sorry I wasn't more help. Good Luck.

"There's no such thing as gravity, the Earth just sucks"

 

[Guest]

I would think if your bios does not detect your drive, that it would be an issue.

Does the motherboard vendor have any updated bioses available for your board?

 

[Guest]

Thanks guys, flashing the BIOS did the trick.

Bdaley> Yeah, I first got it running using MaxBlast. It's very odd that it only worked in DOS and Safe Mode, but it now works perfectly without MaxBlast, so I doubt if I'll ever get to the bottom of this.

Thanks,

- Tom

 

[bdaley]

Glad you're up and running.

Sometimes you get things working, but never figure out what the problem was.

"There's no such thing as gravity, the Earth just sucks"