Will my motherboard support this SATA drive?

[BigWhitey]

Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JD 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive

 

Motherboard:

661FX-TML

 

Is there a minimum BIOS level to be able to boot from a drive that large ?

[red930]

There *shouldn't* be any problem with supporting that drive.

 

The latest BIOS is configured for 48Bit - larger than 130Gb - addressing.

[BigWhitey]

Ok, I've bought a 250Gig SATA drive which the SATA utility recognizes in BIOS before booting up.

 

I never got utility/driver CDs with my motherboard and I am doing a RIS install of XP. Could someone point me to the correct drivers that I need to make XP recognize the RAID controller so I can install XP on this new drive?

 

As it is now, XP tries to load but it can't find the SATA hard drive so it doesn't think there are any hard drives attached.

 

I have made sure SiS Serial ATA controller is enabled in BIOS.

 

Within the RAID utility I get this:

Disk 1 Maxtor 6L250S0 233GB UDMA 6 Single

 

Also how can I get it to use all 250 Gig instead of 233Gb ?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

At this point I'm only trying to put the 250Gig SATA drive and a CD ROM in the PC.

 

 

****Nevermind, got it to work using this info:

http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t30890.html

[cbrabham]

Also how can I get it to use all 250 Gig instead of 233Gb ?

233 GB is the correct size. Drive manufacturers "lie" about drive sizes.

 

Windows, RAID controllers, the BIOS...they all correctly count 1KB as 1024 bytes, 1 MB as 1024 KB, 1GB as 1024 MB.

 

But drive manufacturers count 1GB as 1000MB...which is incorrect and will show you a larger size than the drive actually is. Roughly put it's like this:

 

Drive Manufacturer Method:

250,000,000,000 bytes / 1000 = 250,000,000 KB / 1000 = 250,000 MB / 1000 = 250 GB

 

Correct Method:

250,000,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 244,140,625 KB / 1024 = 238,418.58 MB /1024 = 232.83 GB

 

Note that the 250,000,000,000 bytes isn't an exact figure. For instance, my Seagate 250 GB drive is actually 250,056,704,000 bytes. The actual bytes figure varies a bit from manufacturer to manufacturer.