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arrowshooter

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Just installed a 250gig HD in computer. Had everything up and runnig perfect with XP Pro. I was coppying my son's songs, a lot of them, from old drive to new. when computer rebooted but only gets past the startup screen then stops. I'm stumped.
 
How old is the system? Have you tried restarting the system a few times to see if it continues to freeze up? One of the last programs or driver sets installed may be the problem.
 
The machine itself is about 6 years old. What is wierd is that is was running great. Had it running for about 3 hours with the XP Pro, installing programs and transfering files from old drive. I have tried restarting quite a few times but it stops at the same spot asking to boot from floppy or CDROM. It is acting as if it is not reading the HD.
 
did you try setting bios to auto recognize the hard drive? and i would agree that maybe a program you installed conflicted somehow.
 
It does appear that we have an incompatability issue. The bios will detect the 250gigs but wants to keep reverting back to 33gig. I've got the thing in the hands of my I.S. people here at work to see if they can figure it out. Originially we formatted the disk with the Seagate Discwizard and it seemed to work fine until I went to write to the second partition on the disk. Unfortunately that disk and the computer are not together right now so more tomorrow.
 
i got ya. sometimes the bios is set for a certain size hard disk or smaller and in order to get a large disk to work you have to change the bios to enable large disk support. not sure if you listed the specs of your mobo but if you do then ill see what i can find about how to enable large disk support if you want.
 
thinking bout it furthur.... it has to be formated in nfts not fat. if its formatted fat32 then it can only go as high as 32 gig. for anything larger than 32 gig it has to be formatted in ntfs with large disk support enabled.
 
grumpy1 said:
thinking bout it furthur.... it has to be formated in nfts not fat. if its formatted fat32 then it can only go as high as 32 gig. for anything larger than 32 gig it has to be formatted in ntfs with large disk support enabled.
Click to expand...

With the updated version of fdisk you can go further with Fat32 to about 55gb. On the first WD 250gb drive installed in the old case now used for Vista the DRFAT32 WD Lifeguard utilty saw a 238gb single primary with 98SE on it until deciding to dual boot with Linux. With the correct utility you can go much larger. But on an old system like that the LBA option has to be enabled to run the newer large capacity ide drives. That's what you are thinking of there. I ran into that a few times on some old builds.

The specifications, downloadable user manual, and maybe a bios update are seen as the 845M item at http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/MS6534.htm The board is considered XP ready according to the information seen there. But the link for the user manual turned into a dead end since that information was moved to http://www.msicomputer.com/ But don't waste your time there since "that product no longer exists" is the message seen there. Look for the original manual to see where you get with that if you still have it.
 
That's LBA there. That was seen on the older IBM, Epson, AST, and whatever name 386, 486, 586 machines for enabling large drive support since the bioses on the old boards didn't offer support for the newer and larger drives that started coming out in the late 90s. At that time a 13gb drive was "enormous" in comparison to the 500mb to 2gb commonly seen with 95 systems. Your model board there is a bit newer and most likely no longer sees that limitation. That is afterall an ATA100 not 33 or 66 board there.
 
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