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I recently added a 250GB HD to my computer. The weird thing is that the bios report the capacity as only being 137GB. However the OS (windows xp prof. sp2) sees it just fine and reports it to be about 233GB. Will there be any issues with this since the bios only sees it as 137GB? Will my data become corrupted if I go pass 137GB? Do I have to upgrade the bios?
Lots of information at the following site, but yes the BIOS does need to support 48LBA, whatever XP states:
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If you use that drive you will eventually end up with data corruption. Go to the site Santa linked and read the required parameters to use disks larger than 127GB. The solution is to install a PCI based controller card. If electing to do that be sure that your BIOS supports booting to the controller card and the controller card is 48bit LBA compliant and bootable. Also, not all controller cards support optical disks. Is booting to a different HDrive then the boot option isn't relevent. FYI there are many configurations of controller cards. Look at the options available and pick what suits you best. IDE, SATA, both, optical drives, RAID, etc.
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PCI based controller card? I thought a bios upgrade would be enough for this? Anyone here have Dell Optiplex GX110 pc? Do I need to get a PCI based controller card or is there a bios update that i can use?
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Check with DEll to see if a BIOS update to make you 48bit LBA compliant is available. It is possible. At any rate you can't run as is.
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Also has anyone ever used Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools v11.0. My new drive is a WD. According to this
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/...
It can be used to:
"Set Up Your Hard Drive - Partition and format an installed hard drive; overcome the
137 GB, 32 GB, or 8.4 GB system BIOS limitations."So basically this means i dont need to buy a pci based controller card right?
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Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools, long time I use these utilities but I believe it uses Drive Overlay to overcome BIOS Limitations. If your XP install does a serious ceash it may make it harder to recover.
Checked the DELL site for a BIOS upgrade but no LBA mentioned and as dated 2003 would not expect a 5 year old PC to support LBA anyway:
http://support.euro.dell.com/suppor...
It would of made more sense to buy two smaller drives!!
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According to this
http://support.dell.com/support/dow...
IF i flash my bios to A08 it should work... as it "Added support for 48-bit LBA disk drives"
This should be good enough right? Also thanks Santa and OtheHill for responding to this thread. I really appreciate your help..
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Verify that the BIOS file you are referring to is designed for your exact motherboard model AND version. The version, if there is more than one, will be printed on the printed circuit board, somewhere on the edge. If this is the correct file be sure to also get the correct flash utility file for it and follow the instructions thoroughly. Don't flash if there is a possiblility of a power failure, like during stormy weather. Save a copy of the original bin file so you can restore the BIOS should anything go wrong. All that should be in the instructions. Good luck, a bad flash can render your system inoperable.
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