20Gb HD with a M577 Mobo - No Joy!

[jimshu1]

I try to maintain three systems in my household and just tried to upgrade the HD on my daughter's system with a Maxtor 2B020H1 20Gb Hard Drive. Apparently I hit a barrier with the PcChip's PC100 M577 motherboard. It won't recognize the true drive size or just hangs. I've tried USER and AUTO options in the BIOS setup.

I've downloaded the most recent BIOS I could find for the M577 (Award v990306s.bin) and installed it. No luck. I then placed a jumper across the Maxtor "4092 cylinder limit" pins per Maxtor:

"If you have an older system BIOS that does not address capacities over 2.1GB (BIOS dated pre 1995, or if you are experiencing system hang conditions) you will need to close the 4092 cylinder limit jumper in conjunction with your drive selection of Master, Slave or Cable Select."

No luck. Am I screwed?

Thanks for any replies!
:(

[brad]

As far as I tell the M577 drive size limit with the 990306 BIOS should be 32 Gigs. It sounds as though you have the installation instructions but just in case I have included the link to Maxtor's page for your drive, which is the 20 gig model in their 541DX series. It has a lot of info including manuals, specs, jumpering, troubleshooting, FAQ, etc, and may help you find the problem. Be sure to double check jumpering and cabling, especially their recommendations on using a 40 or 80 conductor cable.

http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/diamondmaxvl/default.htm#541DX

If that doesn't help:

Your mobo uses the VIA MVP3 chipset but the southbridge may be either the 586A or 586B. Neither chip imposes a HD size limit that pertains to this case but the 586A supports up to ATA-33 only, the later up to ATA-66, and the drive ships set to run in ATA-100 mode. That may be the problem as it is still relatively common for an ATA-33 interface to have problems recognizing a ATA-66 or higher drive. This can usually be fixed by using the manufacturer's utility to switch the drive back into ATA-33 mode. I just looked through Maxtor's downloads section and it isn't obvious to me which utility provides that function. Perhaps it is within MAXBLAST.

Hope that helps you find the problem.

Brad

[jimshu1]

Brad,

Just want to thank you for the help. I knew about the Maxtor MaxBlast, but not enough to want to try it 1st thing. Your answer was very informative and convinced me to try it. Unfortunately, I had the M577 with the 586A southbridge as my mobo is limited to ATA-33.

The HD is partitioned and formated now, with a Ghost image loading. What I did was remove the 4092 cylinder limit jumper first, and then set the BIOS setting for the HD's (I have two on this system) on AUTO. I also enabled the UDMA for both master and slave.

Ran MaxBlast and off I went. I think I'm OK now. Thanks again!

[brad]

You're welcome. Let us know if you run into any more problems.

Brad