large hard drive and bios

[surrealchereal]

What happens if the BIOS isn't suited for a large(61 gig) hard drive and it gets installed?
I am having fits trying to get my computer going, I'm down no ideas. Help me please?
Would this prevent the CD from being recognized? wah! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

[Andy_L]

I have worked on a lot of ancient machines here, and one of two things seems to happen if they cannot recognize the hard disk. On the smaller drives (20Gb and under) the PC would recognize them say as an 8 Gb and work fine, allowing you to use one of the manufacturers programs for large disk support (this is assuming no bios flash.) On a friends PC with a Via MVP3 chipset a 45 Gb IBM drive would hang the computer, basically the PC saw something on the IDE bus, didnt know what it was and would freeze. I clipped the drive to 32 GB (cool jumper feature on IBM drives) and told him to live with it, as the board had the newest bios update.

[surrealchereal]

Gee, I am at a loss then, If I have the cd hooked up it doesn't recognize any IDE device,
If I unplug the CD from the secondary slot, and just leave it undone the hard drive untouched, (it's in the primary slot) it shows up. Could it be a virus?? I'm gonna have to start a computer parts flight school.

[Andy_L]

I'm confused, I thought your harddisk was preventing your cdrom from being detected, not the other way around. The hard disk is plugged into the primary controller and jumpered to master, not to master with slave, (if it has the option of either) correct? And your CDROM is plugged into the secondary connector? Have you tried reversing the jumper on your CDROM from slave/master? You can set the bios to none for all disks but your harddisk and your cdrom should still work. Maybe your CDROM is just busted.