bios enhancer or upgrade

[jeffyscott]

Trying to get Award modular bios v. 4.51PG (2/17/97) to recognize drive larger than 8.4 GB. Instuctions that came with the hard drive say to upgrade the bios, install bios enhancer, or use MaxBlast installation software that came with the drive.

I do not want to reformat the drive at this time as there is data I am trying to recover...so the maxblast option is ruled out as I understand it.

What is "bios enhancer" that is refered to? Is this a better (safer) way to go than flash update of the bios?

Will a flash update even eliminate this limitation or is a harware change required? I have downloaded award flasher v 5.0 from wimsbios.com which I found from a link at this site, do I just use this or should I try to track down something from the motherboard mfr?

[awforrest]

Your safest bet is to get the BIOS and flashing utility from your motherboard manufacturers website. Updating the BIOS should allow it to recognize larger hard drives.

I haven't heard of a "BIOS enhancer", unless they're referring to BIOS Savior which is a BIOS backup chip.

[This message has been edited by awforrest (edited 08-06-2001).]

[jeffyscott]

Sorry, I left out a word...the Maxtor instructions refer to "bios enhancer card"...so must be some sort of card to install in computer that gets around that 8.4GB limit.

[buttons3]

get a promise controller card, about $20

[Etruscan]

As far as I know, (I haven't used it for a long time) you can install the MaxBlast overlay without any damage to the contents of the drive. The program just changes the boot sector of the drive and it is completely reversable.

I uninstalled it from a drive without losing information on the drive and it said I could reiinstall it at the time I was making the changes. You have to clean DOS boot, then load MaxBlast and follow their procedure for making the dirve bootable without BIOS support.

You can get exact directions from the technical support department at Maxtor. Their email address is on their net site. There is, I think, directions in the FAQ on Maxtors site as well. It worked for me.


[This message has been edited by Etruscan (edited 08-06-2001).]

[jeffyscott]

Well, bios flash did not work. I tracked down motherboard mfr and they had an update. But when I ran it carefully following the instructions, I got an error message saying "insufficient memory". I thought I'd be dead if I shut the machine off at that point...but the machine ended up starting back up with the old bios program still intact.

I guess I will go with the controller card option now.

Thanks for the Maxblast information, Etruscan, that will help...I did not even know that other "maintainence" stuff was on the maxblast floppy. I will, I think, need to remove the EZ bios (maxblast) thing after I get the controller.

[jeffyscott]

I am not sure what I did but something got this drive to work under the ez-bios/maxblast thingy.

My speculation is that when I converted the drive from slave to master without reformatting, by using a mcaffe rescue disk to create or modify the boot sector, I lost the ez-bios stuff. Then thanks to etruscan's comments I found a feature in the maxblast software that said it would restore the boot sector using a backup created when I first installed the drive (as a slave). When I did this it must have resored the ez-bios stuff to get around the 8GB limit but it did not lose whatever mcaffe rescue disk had done to make it the master/boot drive.