Urgent! Bios Dead!

[baronvongogo]

i dont have a maxtor cd i bought the hard drive from a computer fair. And i dont think its a bad bios but i`ll google it for awhile before i format later to make sure everythings right.

 

[EricB]

here. burn it as a disc image with nero, alcohol or roxio

http://downloads.maxtor.com/downloads/_files/maxtor/en_us/downloads/mxblst4cd.zip

 

[baronvongogo]

ok iv put it on cd and now when i reset i boot from cd, and use this disk. what will it do? format my hard disk?

 

[EricB]

yes you will have quite a few options.

 

[baronvongogo]

ok thank you very much once iv finished backing up my drivers, and AV & spyware software i`ll format in a couple of hours i`ll let you no how it goes thanks for the help.

 

[baronvongogo]

.....*crys* ... it didnt work!! I formatted using maxtor powermax and still 130Gb so I guess im stuck although now iv partitioned properly windows 20 gigs, applications 60 gigs and games 50 gigs. Maybe my hard drive is damaged or i did something which has messed it up. Hopefully it wont cause too much long term damage. Thanks for all your help though much appriciated

 

[EricB]

.....*crys* ... it didnt work!! I formatted using maxtor powermax and still 130Gb so I guess im stuck although now iv partitioned properly windows 20 gigs, applications 60 gigs and games 50 gigs. Maybe my hard drive is damaged or i did something which has messed it up. Hopefully it wont cause too much long term damage. Thanks for all your help though much appriciated

take your mobo back if you can. Call maxtor and ask if for the spec of the hard drive so that you can manually enter it in your bios.

 

[twstokes]

I doubt your hard drive is damaged at all. This is a very common problem with large drives.

Refer back to my post:

It looks like your problem isn't Windows / drivers, it's your BIOS.

This page will tell you what you need to know.

Basically, you have three options:

1. Updating BIOS to support the larger drive

2. Purchase an ATA controller card

3. Use the MaxBlast software provided by Maxtor


If you BIOS doesn't read your hard drive's full capacity, your OS isn't going to read it either without some software or hardware help. (controller card or something like EZ-Bios or MaxBlast)

If your PC could originally see the 200GB, possibly you had the MaxBlast software on there before and it was erased in the format.

 

[baronvongogo]

I cant take my mobo back also from a computer fair lol I might give maxtor a call, and yes it worked with an older bios but ud think a later bios would be even more compatible for larger drives. Anyway im off to bed all this formatting is hurting my brain if anything solves the problem i shall post it thanks for all your help chaps. It was a good learning experiance if nothing else.

 

[EricB]

how is your bios set on the hard drive. it is auto detect? try refreshing it, if you can can.

try setting your bios to the fail safe default and see if that changes anything