asus P2B-VT ( HP oem ) award medallion bios v6.0 / HP rev1.14 64mb nvidia maxtor 30gb pioneer dvd-rw hp cd-rw What is the maximum size hard drive under these conditions Can more hard drive space be added with bios update or time to upgrade to a P4 system Thank you

The P2B supports up to 66mhz HDD speed. Most 40 GB onward HDDs' are ATA100 or ATA133. Upgrading BIOS wouldn't give you the UDMA speed rating increase. You'd better off getting another 30GB as slave drive if you needed more space. There is no good time in PC upgrade, as it always costs you money. Many companies are using pre Y2K PC's slower and older than yours. But, if you think the needs are there, you will find any P4 from 2Ghz and higher, or AMD XP1700 and higher much faster than what you have. And, you could salvage quite a bit from your current system, i.e. floppy, HDD, DVD, R/W CD and may be video card.

Looks like this thing comes either with a intel bx440 or via pro 133 chipset which makes it a strange thing as all asus p2b boards, including all versions from asus are fitted with the bx440 chip! As my asus P2B uses award pg 4.51 bios (last version 10.14 beta3 from 2002) I think you have the one with the via chip. One the following site I found a description of the HP Pavilion 9692C with that board and it has a 40GB drive in it. As this is clearly above the 32GB barrier there is a good chance that you can use harddrives up to 127GB as the normal P2B boards. But you may need a bios update so better check for the newest version or if you can borrow a friends drive above 32 or even better above 60GB just put it in as second drive and check. If the bios detects the drive correctly it works, if not then you need the bios update! http://www.pcbuyersguide.com/hardware/systems/HP_Pavilion_9692C.html I also found a biosupdate for the pavilion 9692c at HP here: http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/softwareDownloadIndex.jhtml?reg=&cc=us&softitem=pv494en&prodId=hppavilion19336&lc=en&plc=&sw_lang=en&pagetype=software But I'm not sure if it will work so be careful! If you know the original number of your hp computer go to: http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html search for pavilion choose your model from the list select os independent if there is a bios update it show then!!!! I also found this infos: http://www.centrix-intl.com/p2b.htm (here you can download the bios for bx440 - if you have that version) http://www.ikor-design.com/ikor-design/product_info.php?products_id=1934

Thank you for the response, 'real_cool' & ' The Weasel' This mobo is in another system that i bought (refurbished) non HP. From what i have read and from answer from Asus, this mobo was made for HP. I have been trying to find a way to contact hp by email but, since this board is no longer in an HP series pc, it's hard to get around the choices they offer ofr support. I think i'll try backing up my bios, applying upgrade and going for larger drive. If it works, great. if not, oh well, time to upgrade to p4 Thanks again for your input, much appreciated

No problem, I have an original P2B board myself and upgraded to a celeron 733MHz nearly a year ago and now it's running smoothly OC'ed at 1232MHz. The bad news is this won't work with your hp version as I'm sure they removed the jumpers for setting the fsb! Good luck!

My experience is that the only >8.4 GB hard drive that works witht the pavilion are the ones that are OEM'd with the system. I have had no luck with bios version 1.16 (4/2000) on my P2B-VT motherboard of my Pavilion 9680c. All hard drives come up with 8.4 GB capacity although both LBA and autodetect are on. I have found no work around for this and am baffled as to why the 40GB drive that came with the system shows up as 40GB. My only guess is that they never wrote the correct Extended Interrupt 13 bios routines that permit ATA hard drives that are larger than 8.4 GB.