Total newbie loser

[VBAHole22]

Okay I have no clue what I am doing but here is my situation: I got a new 40G hard drive and installed it and it is only recognized as being 7.8G. My computer is from 1995 so someone suggested a BIOS upgrade. To do that I think I need to know my motherboard manufacturer. For the life of me I cannot find a manufacturer name anywhere on the thing! All there is is a white sticker that says: 8F401000024 Ver. B02
I realize this prolly means as much to you as it does to me, and that is nothing. There are some chips with names on them like Winbond, ISSI and SSt (on the BIOS chip). How can I find out the motherboard manufacturer? I downloaded a utility called ctbios but the results are in German. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[nja469]

Insert a windows 98, ME, etc. start up disk into your floppy drive and start up your machine. When it asks, you can load it without CD rom support and when you get the boot prompt type in A:/fdisk

FDISK will load, it will immediately ask if you wish to enable large drive support, choose (Y) for yes and hit enter. Create a primary DOS partition, when it's done reboot and load with the startup disk again and this time at the prompt type A:\format c:

Choose es to format it, when asked to enter a label, do so if you wish. After this reboot again with the startup disk and this time chose with CD ROM support and have your windows installation disk in your CD drive. When it finishes loading it will say "Your CD drive is drive D or E, etc" When it comes to the prompt type in the drive letter of the cd rom, we'll say it's "d" and setup, eg.

d:\setup.exe

Windows setup should start, do a scandisk and you should be on your way.

Basically you had to enable large drive support for the computer to recognize a drive over 8GB.

"Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one"

 

[Crashman]

What size does BIOS detect it as?

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had ask more questions first!</font color=blue>

 

[VBAHole22]

Explorer sees it as 7.82G and my c drive is 12.5G

 

[Crashman]

What size does BIOS detect it as?

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had asked more questions first!</font color=blue>

 

[VBAHole22]

BIOS is seeing both drives (primary master and slave) as 8063 all of the settings seem to be identical for both drives

 

[Crashman]

Your BIOS is likely limitted to 8.4GB then, if there is no BIOS update to solve it, you might need an IDE card with it's own BIOS to read it as full size.

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had asked more questions first!</font color=blue>

 

[jlanka]

alternatively, most drive manu's have utilities which allow you to "fake out" the BIOS and run drives which are larger than they support. For instance, <A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast_plus_ii.htm" target="_new"><font color=red>Maxtor's MaxBlast II</font color=red></A>

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Crashman]

This is true!

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had asked more questions first!</font color=blue>