VAIO

Not all BIOS versions can be updated. I have quite a collection of 286/386/486/PI/PII and PIII machines that are in the same situation. That is probably what saved your a$$

If the drive did not come with a CD, please go to the HDD manufacturer's site and get their drive installation toolkit. This will contain a little program that will let you install the new drive as "C:\" and be workable both in the BIOS and Windows.

I won a Digital Venturis PI/133 in a raffle. It had a 1.7Gb HDD and no OS. The best it could recognise in the BIOS was 8.4Gb (another one of those BIOS watersheds). So I stuck a 60Gb 7,200rpm drive in it and used the drive maker's software. It found the drive and installed it correctly, it also found the 8.4Gb Quantum Bigfoot that I had slaved to it, and asked me if I wanted to format it..............I said OK and found that I actually had a 14.4Gb Bigfoot

The only problem is that with most of this software if you need to reformat, you have to reinstall the drive again before reinstalling your OS. Otherwise it works fine.