Does this board need a BIOS update?

Tim

I'm working on a Micron DR-737 motherboard, version 1.01 with a version 1.0A Award plug and play BIOS. The Award BIOS itself is a version 4.51PG. It has a Slot 1 P2 400 Mhz CPU and 512 MB of PC133 memory. And it says "Micron BIOS Version 2.0" on the screen.

It absolutely refuses to recognize a 40 GB hard drive, although a 4 GB drive works great. This 40 GB drive works fine in other computers, and ANOTHER known good 40 GB hard drive also did not do anything in this DR-737 computer.

The POST screen freezes at "Detecting IDE Primary Slave ... [Press F4 to skip]", only you can't press F4 to skip, because it does nothing. You have to control-alt-delete out of it, only to end up coming back to the same screen. You have to hit TAB to even GET to the post screen!

At the bottom of the POST screen it says " 08/17/1998-i440BX-w977tf-2a69kb3fc-00"

I even tried formatting the 40 GB drive as 2 seperate 20 GB partitions, and that didn't help either.

All I can figure is that the BIOS is too old to handle a 40 GB hard drive.

This 40 GB drive also worked great in a similarly vintage Emachines 400i3 computer with a 400 Celeron Socket 370 and 256 MB PC133 ram.

AND, an Abit ST-6 motherboarded computer also ran the 40 GB drive flawlessly. The other 40 GB drive came from this computer for testing.

BIOS flash? Other ideas?

Only the DR-737 has a problem with it.

Donut

I think your on to something. (Bios flash)

Have you tried formating the 40gig down to 8 gig? I recall one of my old machines wouldn't recognize anything over 8 gig.

Kwitko

If you can find the BIOS to flash I'd give that a shot. Otherwise you're going to have to use an ATA adapter card.

madmat

The chipset in your particular board might not recognize drives bigger than 32 gigs, you might try setting the jumpers to 32gig compatability and give it a go.

I've seen it work.