harddrive problem

well its not so much as a problem but i want to know y my computer is not acepting this 80 gig hardrive with out me having to partion it into smaller seprete drives

well so i got the hard drive out of a computer it works fine its a maxtor 80 gig so i took out my old seagate 4.6 gig and put this one in i set it up as the master drive recopied windows and then it said non system disk so i redid it and formated it from ntfs to fat 32 and partitioned it to four 15 gig drives and 1 16 gig drive im soon about to reformat my comp and i would like to know how to fix this so I can make it just one drive

my comp componets are a

video:16 meg voodoo 3 3000

audio:soundblaster live

128 megs ram

pentium two mmx technology at 233mghz overclocked too 266 mghz

ny bios is phoenix version 4.55.05


the motherboard was out of 97 hp x86 series

any help would be appreatated

What operating system are you using?

windows 2000

windows 2000

I was thinking it might be your operating system...but I don't think so anymore.

It must be something on the motherboard.
What's the chipset?
Does your BIOS support the hard drive?

Did your harddrive come with an installation disk? My maxtor hd came with a disk that set up the partitions.

nope no instalation disk

in my bios settings when i get an over veiw of everything it says on ide device one it shows none but Its there and it will work

i think it might be just outdated bios

If it is a never used new HD, did you run fdisk?
http://www.websmileys.com/sm/comp/comp03.gif

yep ive f disked it i created all the partitions to get the hard drive to work

It sounds like you hit the nail on the head; you probably have an outdated BIOS. What is the largest size partition it will let you make? Also, have you ever updated your BIOS?

Your possible solutions are to hope that you can find a BIOS update that will fix it, but more than likely you will need a newer motherboard or you can just get an IDE controller card.

when i go into setup it says hard drive size is 8555

but ive found out by trial en error the largest i can partion it to and it function is 16 gigs


im really good wiyth comps and such i basically built this comp ive just never delt with bios where could i donw load a new bios update or search for one and is it that hard to udate and install BIOs

If the largest partition you can make is 16gb, then Polygon's right. Either your BIOS needs to be updated (this will fix it most of the time) or the chipset is too outdated (usually can't fix that) and you'll need a controller card.

As for the BIOS, find out who manufactured your motherboard and which model board it is (including the revision) and go to their website and look for the BIOS that matches your model and revision. You'll need the newest stable BIOS and the flash utility that will allow you to update the BIOS (this is usually done with a boot disk from a DOS-like environment). Both the BIOS and flash utility are typically located on the manufacturer's website.