Hi This is a follow on from a follow on.. to an earlier post about BIOS settings which might limit the size of the second hard drive I intend to install. I have run AIDA32 which tells me that: My motherboard is MSI K7TM Pro (MS-6340) BIOS Version is 3.1 (release date 2/12/01) I then did another search and found out that the BIOS "type" is PLCC. From this can anyone help me determine the maximum size of any hard drive that my system will support? Many thanks for your time, patience and perseverance. Gracias Antonio

Hola Antonio! Como estas? I just did a research on your motherboard, but unfortunately I did not find any information regarding the maximum hard drive capacity it would support. If I were you I would try a 30 GB hard drive. That size may or may not oK for that mobo.

You will have to read this for yourself, but..... http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_detail.php?UID=101&kind=1 near the bottom of the page, it states version 1.1 supports 'Support Big Size HDD>65G'. Is this your board ????? If it's not, I'm too tired to see properly.

For the date you indicate up to 137 GB for all hard drives you set up.The bios detects and saves the hardware basic configuration settings.You have 2 IDE ports making the max number of hard drives 4 without an extra IDE PCI card for more.You would loose the benefit of your cdrom drive with so many hard drives...Make sure you have the power supply to accomodate more than one hard drive and all the installed hardware.Good luck.

Knowing that you have a MSI system board, I would think you would go to the MSI web site and look up information on your system board. They even have tools that will examine your version of BIOS on your board and recommend updates. Their BIOS updates for the K7TM Pro (MS-6340)do not list a version 3.1 (2/12/2001) for download. Their current version is 4.7 (1/13/2002) for the Award BIOS. Their brief revision history shows that they did not start supporting greater than 137GB drives until version 4.4 (8/6/2001) of the Award BIOS. And in their current AMI BIOS version 1.1 (3/29/2001) they add BIOS support for drives larger than 65GB. (not sure if that means larger than 137GB though). From the sounds of it, you might need to do a BIOS update to the latest v4.7 Award BIOS so you can add any size drive you need. Just keep in mind that Windows ME does not support partitions greater than 137GB, so a larger drive would have to be partitioned into multiple partitions/drives.

Thanks to everyone, especially JackG Tony