I'm WinDumb and I admit it!

[Ilwrath]

I've just got this feeling I need to spnd yet more money...Doh...!

Naw... I don't think so.  First try updating the motherboard BIOS.  (As stated, make sure you pick the exact perfect match for your motherboard -- "close enough" will usually result in a terminally broken system!)  

Then, if that doesn't work, try a utility that allows larger HDs.  I installed a 60GB Western Digital in an old Pentium 133mhz machine, by using the WD EZ-Drive utility.  Originally with BIOS only, the machine only recognized like 6 GB of the drive.  With the utility, it easily handled the full drive size.  Couldn't have been easier.

Since, then, EZ-Drive has been replaced by "Data Lifeguard Tools", which is still a free download...
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools  (Not sure if it works properly on non-WD drives, though.  But odds are, your drive manufacturer has a similar toolkit.)

[JaXanim]

@speel...etc

I've never flashed anything in my life, let alone my BIOS!

What the heck do I do?

I assume I download the fresh Flash to a floppy and run it from a DOS screen...?

Scarey stuff for an Amigan!

Cheers,

JaX

[odin]

Have a look on the Abit website. The link takes you to the support page of your mobo (though it say BX6 V2.0 :-?) have a read in the BIOS update section. I think that should shed some light on the business. If you still have probs after that...shoot :-)

(Fun eh, PC's ;-)).

-ed-
Here's the helppage on ABit's page detailing a fairly idiotproof guide to updating once's flashrom.

-ed2-
I noticed that should you ever want to upgrade the CPU on that board it's a very real possibility. It accepts upto 0,5GHz P3 CPUs.

[JaXanim]

@Ilwrath

It's a Maxtor, so I'll check out their partitioning stuff before risking the flashy stuff.

Reflashing the BIOS sounds quite hairy to me, but as I said, I don't flash very often.....in fact never!

Cheers,

JaX

[Holley]

I dunno, I had a lot of trouble with partitions on a 10GB drive with NT4. Windows 2000 is the only version of Windows worth a crap IMO

I guess you had the same problem here, as I did before.  I guess Windows2000 had a workaround for the limit I was experiencing before, judging by what people have said here it's a bios thing - like an Amiga once booted a OS can circumvent the bios (or 3.1 FFS) though.  I've only ever flashed to fix bios bugs ...

My favourite version of Windows is 3.1, that was the last one where I knew what every single file did ;-)

[Ilwrath]

Maxtor's MaxBlast 3

This looks like what you'd need....

[JaXanim]

@Ilwrath

OK, I just downloaded MaxBlast 3 from the Maxtor site to my Amiga.

The .exe file is 1.85Mb.

How do I get this into the PeeCee when I only have the standard floppy drive working?

Doh...Doh...!

JaX

[Ilwrath]

How do I get this into the PeeCee when I only have the standard floppy drive working?

I think the instructions were that it should be downloaded on a PC and then executed to create the boot floppy.  :-(  maybe PC Task on Amiga can help?  ;-)

If not... You might have to borrow a working PC to make the disk.  Bummer...  What a pain.  And people complain about making ADFs back into floppies.  haha!

[odin]

Tried zipping the exe? (probably wont compress to 720kByte though :-)). You could always use some join and split util. As a matter of fact zip supports hacking an archive into bits I think.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

JaXanim wrote:
@speel...etc

I've never flashed anything in my life, let alone my BIOS!

What the heck do I do?

I assume I download the fresh Flash to a floppy and run it from a DOS screen...?

Scarey stuff for an Amigan!

Cheers,

JaX

the flashing I did was really simple, actually:
gather all the information about the mobo, then search for the appropriate boot utility and especially, the appropriate bios binary. put it on a bootdisk (you can make a bootdisk under DOS with: sys A:, or: format A: /s)
start your computer with this bootdisk (make sure booting from floppy is enabled in your bios) start in the command line the utility with the bios binary filename as argument (like: flash bios.bin) and there you go! Make sure you have minimal software in memory, like cdrom drivers etc. to prevent locking up, and make sure you do not turn off your computer or anything else that interrupt the flashing process, otherwise the mobo will be destroyed)

oh, btw.

JaXanim wrote:
@speel...etc

cut 'n paste 'll do.
otherwise you can also say Eyso
:-)

[JaXanim]

OK, I reflashed the BIOS as detailed on the ABit ancient mobos (BX6) website. This appears to have gone through without any trouble. I redid the CMOS settings as necessary and rebooted. I have the new 80Gb drive as the Channel1 slave atm.

Win98 came up OK but when I tried to format Drive D: it said it was only 1Gb!

So we've gone from 12Gb to 1Gb by this exercise. A sort of Flash down the pan eh?

Clearly (?) this isn't gonna get me there.

I'd like to try the Maxtor MaxBlast installer, but I need to get this old PeeCee online now, doh!

I have a PCI modem, but there's no driver for it. The system sees a PCI serial card but can't find a driver on the Win98 CD

Do I need to download it from somewhere?

Cheers,

JaX

[Waccoon]

OK, I reflashed the BIOS as detailed on the ABit ancient mobos (BX6) website.

Ah, good.  Other people should note that if you can't upgrade the BIOS on your motherboard, a cheap hard drive controller (like the SIIG ATA100 PCI card), will fix the problem.  The computer uses the BIOS on the PCI card, rather than the mobo.

Windows 98 has a limit, IIRC it's 35Gb ish

Per partition.  Make 2-3 partitions and Win98 should use the whole drive.  FDisk sucks for this, though.

Win98 came up OK but when I tried to format Drive D: it said it was only 1Gb!

BE CAREFUL!  Win98 might have gotten its remapping confused.  You don't want to format the wrong drive.

Never format a drive until after you partition it, not even for testing purposes.  PC BIOSes get drive letters confused easily, and Windows98 just uses whatever letters the BIOS has assigned to the drive.

Here's a few programs to try that are pretty small.  I haven't used them, though.
http://www.mecronome.de/xfdisk/index.php
http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/

[odin]

:lol: Sorry jaxanim, PC's sure are fun eh ;-).

As for the modem, *shrug*.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

:-?
I fear I cannot really help you any further, JaX
I haven't used a bigger hd than a 40gb
hm, well, maybe you should search for the partitioning program "gdisk" (I believe it's from Norton)
That should fit on a single disk and I've solved quite a few hdd problems with it.
It's not really easy to use, since it uses many arguments.

[JaXanim]

@All

Panic over! My 80Gb drive is now installed and fully functional. Thanks to the links offered by Waccoon, I've managed to FAT32 format the full capacity (albeit in a 1Gb and a 79Gb partitions). Don't know why this was necessary, but I'm not complaining about that.

@Waccoon

Many thanks for those links. You saved me a lot of heartache and hassle! All the best for you!

@All

As and when I get my webcam coupled up to my telescope, I'll post some astropics to celebrate our success!

All Hail!

JaX

[ShadesOfGrey]

JaXanim wrote:
@All

Panic over! My 80Gb drive is now installed and fully functional. Thanks to the links offered by Waccoon, I've managed to FAT32 format the full capacity (albeit in a 1Gb and a 79Gb partitions). Don't know why this was necessary, but I'm not complaining about that.

IIRC, (as I haven't used M$ FDISK in quite some time) you aren't limited to 1GB for the first parition.  But you are warned to keep any bootable partition(s) before the first gigabyte of the drive.  This is a 'limitation' of the M$ boot loader...  I believe the Amiga/OS also has a similar 'limit'.  Anyway, you should be able to resize/merge your partitions using the commercial Partition Magic or Partition Commander, or the freeware/opensource tools like FIPS.  You might consider looking into the Ultimate Boot CD.  It's pretty handy for doing things like partitioning a drive (it includes several freeware/demo disk tools, benchmarks, system info and even boot-managers) or flashing the BIOS on a PC.