Did I bite off more HD than my 571 3.2A can chew?

[Lex]

Sorry if this has been asked and answered a zillion times before, but...

What's the largest HD a box-stock 571 3.2A will support? No BIOS revisions, just whatever it came with.

I'm a photographer and have quickly exceeded the capacity of my puny 1.2GB HD. It's a slowpoke anyway. So when I saw a great buy on a WD600BBRTL I pounced.

Without thinking...

Now it occurs to me this mobo may not be able to digest a 60GB HD. Nuts. I don't want to return it 'cause the price was so good. And I don't wanna buy a new 10GB or smaller HD 'cause the prices aren't cost-effective compared with the larger capacity drives.

Advice? Ideas? Sarcastic remarks? :rolleyes:

[jim chase]

Sorry if this has been asked and answered a zillion times before, but...

Not quite a zillion times yet :) .

Usually, with the original bios 8.4gb is the max I believe. With a bios upgrade 32gb is max.

A couple of ways I can think of to go here. The best would be a promise ata100 card. I would go the cheap way, install the WD drive overlay program to fool the bios. Also, first use the WD utility to set the drive back to ata33. I did this with a WD200BB, the ata33 and not the overlay, and it benchmarks at about 25mbs with HD tach.

Jim

PS I assume your using win9x or ME. I'm not sure if XP will work with an overlay.

[Lex]

Thanks for the suggestions, Jim. Couple more questions...

Will doing what you suggested make any irreversible changes? Because I'll probably swap the drive to a more powerful PC later this year.

If I don't upgrade the bios will the 571 only recognize it as an 8.4GB HD?

Hmm...I'm starting to wonder whether I ought to just buy a few more zip disks to store my photos. The darned things are just the least cost-effective storage media around nowadays.

[jim chase]

Will doing what you suggested make any irreversible changes? Because I'll probably swap the drive to a more powerful PC later this year.
No, the overlay can be removed with "fdisk /mbr" the ata33 can be reset to ata100 by rerunning the WD utilities.


If I don't upgrade the bios will the 571 only recognize it as an 8.4GB HD?
With a drive overlay the whole drive will be recognised by windows.

Jim

[Lex]

Thanks much, Jim. I'll report back after I try this.

[brad]

I second Jims recommendation. Save your money, use WD's "easy install" program and enjoy the fast ride your new drive will take you on. An ATA-100 controller card will not improve real-world performance in your case.

[Lex]

Okey doke, sounds good! Thanks, fellers. :D

[henry troth]

Hope this isn't too late. Before you decide to use any drive overlay program read about the problems removing the overlay AND keeping the data:

http://www.wdc.com/support/faqs/software/ezdrive.asp#lba [FAQ 29, 30 & on]

http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm [Select Product Support, Desktop (ATA) Drives then Technical Procedures] [Docs 24003, 24006, 24019, 24020]

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/dm71x-lba.html [Migrate from DM to LBA]

One common problem is to add a second drive and be able to access the new drive or the old one but not both at the same time (like wanting to copy files from the oldd drive to the new one). Another common problem is to desire to remove the overlay and still see the data - usually doesn't work.

If you choose to use a drive overlay make sure that you design a very robust data backup system (like CD-Rs) and USE IT.

Good Luck,
Henry

[Lex]

Thanks for the advice, Henry. I'll check those references.

I'd like to simply add the 60GB Western Digital as a second drive, especially since it took quite a bit of trouble to get my 571 3.2A mobo running without trouble (installing patches, etc.). But so far I've been unable to get the mobo to recognize two HDs simultaneously. It'll do one or the other, but not both. I've swapped ribbon cables, fooled around with bios settings, tried just about everything I can think of. Any suggestions appreciated.

[jim chase]

But so far I've been unable to get the mobo to recognize two HDs simultaneously.

Check the jumper settings for the master drive. Many drives have a master alone setting and a master with slave present setting.

Jim

[chagrinboy]

I have a M571 V7.0A and have a 60GB IMB Hard disk installed on the mainbord's IDE.

At first, I could not get the bios to auto detect the drive. so I entered the bios and changed the setting to user, and enterd the drive's number of blocks, heads, & sectors.

works fine with this setting, and saved me from buying a PCI card.

[brad]

Do you have more than 32 megs in the boot/primary partition yet?

[chagrinboy]

Brad,

Do you mean 32GB (not MB) as my primary partition?

No, I have 60GB (Giga-Byte) primary partition (C) with FAT32 as my allocation table.

I have full access to the partition.

Correction to previous post:

Cylinders, heads, & sectors, specificly:16,383 cylinders, 16 Heads, & 63 sectors.

Some older boards in my experience, can be tricked by setting up the drive manually, even though they do not support larger drives.

[brad]

Sorry I wasn't more clear. If the drive is partitioned as one, how many gigs are used space? If there is more than one partition, how many gigs are used space in each?

I ask because I and others have tried several 40 gig drives on a M571 with the 04-21-99 BIOS. Auto-detect, as expected, didn't work. Entering the drive parameters manually made everything look ok, they formatted fine and otherwise worked great, UNTIL the system tried to write to an LBA past the 32 gig point, which then corrupted the disk. That happened with a WD400BB, 45 gig IBM 75GXP, and 40 gig 60GXP.

In other words, depending on how much stuff you have on the drive, you may not be home free after all. BUT, if you have enough data on the drive to know beyond ANY possible doubt that data IS being written to LBAs beyond the first 32 gigs and nothing bad happened, then it looks like a miracle and you are gonna be very popular to say the least!

[chagrinboy]

Brad,

Now I understand where your coming from.

No, I am not using more than 32GB, in fact I'm only using 3GB and have no intention of ever using more than 10GB.

I prefer to use less than 25% of any Hard drive, so The drive will not seek all day.

In fact, in a month or so, I will upgrade that machine and thow a old HDD in it & give it to a friend.

sorry for any confusion.

[brad]

No problem. Glad you're aware of it now and of course that you haven't lost any data. Miracles are possible....

[Lex]

Brad, I've heard this warning elsewhere about writing past the 32GB limit. Since my primary need for a better HD is due to doing lots of image editing I'd planned to reserve a generous portion of the HD for swap space.

If I partion my 60GB drive into 2 partitions of 30GB each, and use one only as swap space, do you think the partition that holds my programs and data will be safe?

[brad]

I strongly recommend against putting all of your eggs in one basket in your case. A pair of physical hard drives affords far more safety than one unless you have a burner or other dedicated backup device. I'd take a pair of 20 or 30 or 40 gig drives any day of the week.

Also, if the swap space you're referring to is the windows swap file, not a good idea to put it on another partition of the same physical drive. It will slow down the drive and give the head stack a helluva workout by sending them flying all over the place, literally.

The more one has, the more one can't stand to loose it......