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Thread: Hardrive Weirdness.

  1. December 18th, 2003, 01:15 AM #1
    VicE$DoS$
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    Hardrive Weirdness.

    I have no clue on this one, has anyone got any sensible suggestions?

    I've put a Samsung 6.4gb harddrive in my Win 98se machine.
    Fdisked it...it FAT32'ed ok.
    Windows recognises it and reports the correct size. Its fully accessable.

    BUT

    AmiBios doesnt recognise it at all, Wont autodetect it and wont accept my manual settings.
    Its totally invisible to AmiBios.

    AmiBios Version 1.19
    AMD K6 2/500 500mhz
    Samsung SV0644A 6.40gb. 13232 Cylinders 15 heads and 63 sectors.

    I've played with the jumpers, FDISK'ed it twice, and was going to upgrade the bios but it seems there is no upgrade available

    What have I done wrong?

    Ho Ho my Hardrives a Ho.

    V$D$
    I remember when Nihil was ickle. Does that mean I'm old?
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  2. December 18th, 2003, 01:29 AM #2
    rcgreen
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    Its fully accessable.
    So ignore the glitch in the BIOS. The drive is useable, right?
    I came in to the world with nothing. I still have most of it.
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  3. December 18th, 2003, 01:33 AM #3
    VicE$DoS$
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    I couldnt agree more ..but if I cant fix it it'll just eat me upside until I cant think of anything else. A killing spree at the AmiBios HQ followed by police shoot out would ultimatley end in my demise.

    So you see? its a matter of life and death.

    V$D$
    I remember when Nihil was ickle. Does that mean I'm old?
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  4. December 18th, 2003, 01:49 AM #4
    rcgreen
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    Think of it as a "feature" rather than a bug.
    or "It's there to teach you humility"

    Every computer you'll ever own will have some annoying
    shortcoming. Oh, well...
    I came in to the world with nothing. I still have most of it.
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  5. December 18th, 2003, 02:23 AM #5
    nihil
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    OK mate,

    I do not know Samsung drives, but all the current suppliers have installation proggies on their sites. Sounds as if your BIOS does not understand the size of the drive? the installation proggie will install something like "EZydrive" that intercepts the BIOS boot and tells it all about this "megadrive" that you have.

    Try the samsung site for a utilities/installation disk. If they have sold out to some other company (can't remember), then try the new owner's site.

    Do you have another drive in the box? if so what make? we can use their toolkit perhaps?

    I will take a look in the morning and get back if I can find anything more useful than my L96-A1

    It will take me about 6 hours to Surrey so don't start before I get there

    Good luck
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  6. December 18th, 2003, 06:18 AM #6
    fourdc
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    Don't let it eat you. This happens, it's life. If your system works and the drive is fully accessible don't sweat the bios. We had this problem at work when we couldn't get 2.1gb drives anymore for a couple of legacy systems. Qnx ignored the bios and works fine with the larger drives.
    ddddc

    "Somehow saying I told you so just doesn't cover it" Will Smith in I, Robot
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  7. December 18th, 2003, 06:18 PM #7
    nihil
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    Hi VicE$DoS$,

    Back as promised

    http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...ties/index.htm

    This is the link that I mentioned. The Samsung installation tool is Dc10 something or other and will currently support drives up to 137 Gb.

    You may have a slight problem if your BIOS is very old, you will just have to try it and see.

    I have an old Digital PI/133 that thinks it has two 8.4Gb drives when actually it has a 60 and a 12. The HDD installation utility and large disk manager cuts in when I boot, so Windows sees the drives correctly. The BIOS does "see" the drives though.......it just gets the size wrong.

    The box in am using right now is is quite an old machine and has AmiBios 1.00.09.DTO dated 22/02/1998. It has 6.4 and a 2.1Gb drives, so your BIOS (1.19) should be able to handle the 6.4 size? it just does not seem to recognise the drive configuration? Hopefully the Samsung drive utility will sort this out?

    Cheers
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  8. December 18th, 2003, 06:42 PM #8
    Lord Xavier
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    i have somethin' in mind.. how could be if the bios could not detect at all the hdd but your win98 can detect it.. wat i know that if the bios recognize that hardware then the OS could have it..
    Lord Xavier,
    Cyberdelia Technologies,
    (Wholly owned by Cyberdelia Group).
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  9. December 18th, 2003, 07:37 PM #9
    nihil
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    Hi Lord Xavier,

    I think I see what you are getting at..............if the BIOS does not detect a hard drive, it will not make it available to the operating system?

    From what has been described, I think that the BIOS detects the drive but does not have a matching description in its database. Its reaction to this appears to be to display nothing in the setup screen?

    The old Digital PI/133 I referred to has Phoenix BIOS. This reports both the 60Gb and 12Gb drives as exactly the same type of 8.4Gb drive. I guess that this is the largest configuration it can handle, so it defaults to using that description for anything bigger?

    What is strange is that VicE$DoS$ has a more modern machine than this PII/266. His BIOS seems to be a later version of AmiBios than on this machine, so it should recognise a 6.4Gb drive in terms of capacity. I think it just isn't recognising Samsung's cylinders, heads and sectors configuration.

    Cheers
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