will this work?

[paolow]

can anyone help me with a quickie? ive got an old p3 800 machine that is used for video editing and as such meeds big drives for storage. ive got a 250 gigger but the bios on the machine doesnt recognise it. there are no bios upgrades available so i thought the other solution is a card like this: www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=60610&_LOC=UK which im hoping will allow the drive to interact with the mobo. simple question then, will it work or am i barking up the wrong tree??
thats it!
TIA,
Paolow

[mattley]

This ....

www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/sb/cs-009299.htm

... is what you need, deployment instructions vary depending on OS.

[aldi]

If you're booting off a different drive and running NT/2K/XP just set the bios to 'none' and let windows find it, you'l be sweet.

[paolow]

fantastic! cheers guys - ill give it a go and report back!

[paolow]

It didnt work
nothing i do with the bios, with accelerators or anything will make windows see past 137 gb. windows wont spot the drive unless its formatted and i feel like im going in circles. do you guys have any ideas? will the original idea of a pci interface card work for me?
TIA

[jimmyjimjim]

Silly question - have you service packed windows? XP won't address drives bigger than 137Gb without either sp1 or 2 (can't remember which).

[aldi]

What version & service pack of windows are you running?

[voyds9]

Can't you stick it in another machine that will recognise it then use something like partition magic to split it into two smaller drives then reinstall in your first computer?

[paolow]

hi guys,
thanks for the input,
im runnning xp pro with no service packs, my friend whose drive it is, is running 2k pro with sp4. ive tried formatting using my machine but it fell over. however! my dad has a fully packed version of xp - i could try formatting the bugger with that? if that fails and i do split it into 2 smaller partitions is there a way of making windows see the two as one big drive?
thanks for all the help on this, its frustrating indeed to be close to getting it to work but still scratching my head a little!

>> Edited by paolow on Saturday 4th February 23:53

[aldi]

You might have to service pack your windows, or use mattley's link (after partitioning on a 'packed system)

[fish]

Service pack your XP that should solve it.

[jimmyjimjim]

Formatting it in your father's pc should work. Failing that, install XP on 137 Gb of it, then go to sp2. After that, get a copy of ghost, and increase the partition size to the full size of the disk. Worked for me.

[paolow]

Yaaaay!
thanks for the tips guys! it works and ive now got 250 loveley gigs sitting there waiting to be used. in the end the suggestion to format on the xp sp2 machine worked wonders and as soon as it was put in the new (old) machine worked a treat! thanks again peeps - i owe you all a beer