hi y'all - i've got a bit of a problem.


My roommate has asked me to upgrade her PC with minimal fuss and expense and i've been working on it. She doesn't want to upgrade the mobo or the processor, mainly cuz it's so expensive, but here's what i've got so far:


She's got an ASUS P2B board with a 300mhz processor.

I stuck a new 256 stick in it, and a new soundcard. That went fine - the problem i'm having is the new samsung 80gb harddrive i'm trying to put in.


It is not detecting it. Actually that's a lie - it detected it once, and i actually was able to get XP semi-installed on it, but on the reboot it choked.


Originally it got to the second splashscreen and would hang on HDD auto detection.

I was able to get it detected by manually selecting the harddrive, and selecting Normal mode. It hung on LBA mode and Large Mode.

Either way on the post-install bootup it choked again. if i try to set it as a slave to the old HD, the Bios recognizes neither.


My first instinct is to upgrade the bios. But i asked one person i trust, and he says besides flashing the bios, installign a new IDE controller would definitely solve the problem. i spoke to another person i trust and he mentioned soemthing about some utility that gets the bios to recognize the first 2 gig and then once you get to windows you see the rest of the drive.

The PC currently has a 4gig drive in there. does anyone have any suggestions?