[djrock]

Hello I bought a 160GB hard drive. I will getting it in about 2 weeks time since the first one the shop ordered arrived on Friday and it was broken and now their on a week's holiday.
How do i know if my motherboards onboard RAID and IDE controllers will support the 160GB drive. My motherboard i think was made about 15 August 2002. I have looked in my motherboards manual and it does not tell me if the both controllers support 48bit addressing.

Thankyou
djrock

Link to motherboard manual http://www.epox.nl/manuals/mu-8k5a3+11.pdf

 

[JohnWill]

It the manufacturer won't tell you, you connect a large drive and see if you can access the entire capacity!

 

[djrock]

I have emailed them but they won't reply until next week so i thought it would be quicker to ask here.

 

[dustyjay]

Not certain but your mobo should support larger hard drives. Make sure that if you are using WinXP you have SP1 installed also that will allow the os to recognise hard drives larger than 137 Gb.

 

[crjdriver]

Most likely both your raid controller and the ide controller will accept a drive of that size. I check Epox's site and the bios updates do not address large hd so I would guess that it already supports large drives. Your raid bios is updated when you update the system bios.

 

[Wet Chicken]

I have looked in my motherboards manual and it does not tell me[/url]

That's because it's the BIOS that controls this. Check with the mobo web site and see if there is a new (recent) BIOS for your board. The BIOS manufacture will know if it handles a large drive or not.

 

[crjdriver]

That board uses a highpoint hpt374 raid controller [if I remember] it will have no problem with a 160 gig hd. If you setup raid 0, make sure you have some type of backup plan. If one of the drives dies, you loose everything. Even raid 1 or 0 /1 should have a backup plan.

 

[Wet Chicken]

If one of the drives dies, you loose everything

 

[djrock]

Just got an email back from epox and they said no the motherboard will not supported the 160gb drive but i don't believe them since i was told by my friend that works in the shop where i bought the motherboard from. He said not to believe them. I can't remember the explanation but they have given me wrong advice before. I had a problem that my system when i started it up sometimes it would beep and shutdown. They said it was the power supply's 5v line but no it was a bad fan on the heatsink. The beep was the no fan warning signal.

Thankyou

djrock

 

[djrock]

I was told if the bois does not detect the full size if you use winxp sp1a with ntfs it will see the full size of the drive but i also read after the 137gb limit it can start corrupting data is this true? Has anyone got a system that the bois can't see the full size of the hard drive but have winxp sp1a with ntfs and having no problems.

Thankyou

 

[Wet Chicken]

It corrupted my Windows file last night. I booted and it gave me the dreaded "Explorer.exe corrupted. You must reinstall windows." error message. It took over 7 hours to do that

I can't wait to get my new motherboards today, so I won't have to use this &^%$# controller card anymore. And even WITH the controller card it still only sees 149 Gigs

 

[djrock]

Hello i found my answer on high points website which confirms what everybody has been saying except its about the RocketRAID 404 but i think thats ok since it uses the hpt374 chip.

Question:
My motherboard's onboard IDE controller cannot support larger hard drives. Does the RocketRAID 404 card support drives larger than 137GB?

Answer:
Yes, our host adapter cards support hard drives larger than 137GB in size.
Make sure the appropriate BIOS and driver versions are installed for the card. Some of the card's may not have been shipped with the necessary revision.

1.21 or higher is required for the RR404.

So if this is right and when i get my 160gb drive and it works i will not need to shell out more money for a ide controller.

Thankyou all for helping

 

[MAX[UTM]]

accually i bought a 160 gig hardrive as well and it also can only use 137 gigs. i heard u need windows pack 4. and your processor has to be sertain amount for it to work as 160 gigs.