Installing a large hard drive but not sure about motherboard

I want to get a big hard drive like a 30+ GB, but I've heard that my motherboard may not support anything bigger than 8GB. Now, I have been told that there is a way to bypass this problem by using a disk manager program. Do you know about this? Where do I get this program and how do I use it?

This question was answered on November 11, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Thanks for your question Your motherboard probably will support the larger hard drive If anything it'll be your BIOS that won't support it There are a few options for you;

1 Let the BIOS see the drive as a smaller drive

2 Upgrade the BIOS

3 Upgrade the entire system board

4 Use software that interfaces between the older BIOS and the large-capacity drive.

The first option may or may not work, depending on your BIOS Some BIOSs that do not support large-capacity drives will not see a large drive, but will simply see the larger hard drive as a smaller drive they can support In this case, the BIOS will assign a drive capacity smaller than the actual capacity You can use this method, although you will be wasting drive space.

Most large-capacity drives come with software on a disk designed to perform the translation between the older BIOS and large-capacity drive I once had a 1.2-GB hard drive that came with a floppy disk labeld Max-Blast Disk Manager 7.04 To use this software, I booted from the disk and followed the instructions on the screen Doing this created a small partition or logical drive on the hard drive that stored the software to manage my new large hard drive for my older BIOS It's important to keep this disk in a safe place in case you need it to access the hard drive if the software on the drive becomes corrupted.

Some hard drives come with disk manager software already installed on the drive For a drive manufactured by Maxtor, the disk manager software is found in a directory called \MAX in a 112-MB partition that BIOS recognizes as drive C The rest of the drive is assigned to other partitions or logical drives such as drive D or E.

If you upgrade the BIOS remember that the new BIOS must also relate correctly to the chip set on the system board Follow the recommendations of the system-board manufacturer when selecting a BIOS upgrade One last thing, don't change options in setup unless you are very sure of what you are doing.

Good luck

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Posted by Jeffrey of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on November 11, 2001

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