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What determines HD size for MB?

PostPosted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 10:23 am
by Intimidator
I have a Biostar M7VIG Pro MB with the VIA KM266/VT8235 Chipset. Is it the chipset that controls the HD size?

It says it supports Ultra DMA33/66/100/133

What is the LARGEST HD that I can use on my system?

Thanks

PostPosted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 7:09 pm
by dodecahedron
did you check out Biostar's wesite?
they might have BIOS updates for the motherboard to detect larger (newer) HDs.

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 8:42 am
by Intimidator
I emailed Biostar tech support and this was the response:

"I have tested the board with a 160 gig hard drive. So it passes the 137
gig limitation. You may need a windows patch to see past the 137 gig
mark."

I am not too sure about this windows patch they mentioned.

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 1:00 pm
by dodecahedron
what version of Windows are you running ?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 1:50 pm
by Intimidator
W2K Pro

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 4:14 pm
by dodecahedron
i don't know of any windows patch. AFAIK Win2K can handle large HDs.
if your motherboard's BIOS supports large capacity HDs (as Biostar's CS reply implies) you should have no problem. you can use any HD as large as you like.

why don't you email that CS back and ask him what windows patch he's talking about?

BTW you'll probably want to format then using NTFS rather than FAT32.

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 8:48 pm
by TheWizard
Check this out. :wink:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;305098

Bottom line: SP2 and above supports hard drives larger than 137GB. So, basically, SP2 is the "patch" you need.

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 9:36 pm
by Intimidator
But I am not running XP. I am running W2k Pro so this SP2 patch won't help in this situation.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:10 am
by dodecahedron
Intimidator, Wizard is talking about Win2K's SP2. Win2K has SPs as well.

by the way, according to the KB article, SP2 doesn't support drives larger than 137GB (Wizard misread), you need an SP newer than SP2. the latest is SP4.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 9:36 am
by Intimidator
I think that is the one I have. Thanks!

PostPosted: Sat Oct 23, 2004 2:07 am
by TheWizard
Listen to dodecahedron and not me. I did misread the page, my mistake, but I did not misread the title of the page. :) "48-Bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows 2000"