Old bios won't recognize (relatively) big HD

[lotas]

Hi,

I have an old PIII with a QDI Legend Advance 9 motherboard (Apollo Pro 133 chipset). According to the mobo manual, the maximum HD size supported is 8.4 Gb in LBA mode and (i understand) about 60gb in Larde mode.

I have an seagate 80GB IDE HD and the bios hangs whenever i try to autodetect the HD. It is possible however to manually introduce the hd configuration parameters to make the bios think the hd is smaller.

That way I've been able to install debian using a separate /home partition under the 8gb limit but that won't do the trick to allow dual boot with windows. I get an "error loading OS" message. The HD is ok though, I've tried it in a newer computer.

Google says upgrading the bios won't solve the problem. I could use seagate's disk
tools to limit the hd capacity, but i don't want to waste storage.

What I would like to ask is if a pci IDE controller (like this one, for instance) would solve my problem.


Thanks

 

[das_stig]

You need to use Seagate's dynamic drive overlay software to sit between the HDD and BIOS/HDD controller.

As for the PCI card, probably will have better support for large HDD's than your old motherboard.