Large Drive Support - WD - Soyo 5EMA+ Pro

**Brangwen** · June 7th, 2002, 05:42 PM

Fellow Members:

I'm putting together (a 3 month work-in-progress!) the above Soyo board and a 233 MMX Socket 7 CPU. I tried cabling 2 different 8+GB WD HDDs, but I received error message: "invalid Disk" or "drive error." (Along those lines). I then tried a Seagate 200 MB, and the machine booted right up. I was stumped, but then remembered the size limit on some older boards that require BIOS overlays, etc. I have not used a WD on my primary systems for several years. Can someone describe which WD utility I should try, and how to go about using it? If I boot with a boot disk, I'll have a ramdrive. Do I then load a BIOS utility to support large HDDs? Or what?

I'm a tad confused and frustrated, but it's still a fun project. Any help would be appreciated.

Thx.

Brangwen

**Kuasimodem** · June 10th, 2002, 12:33 AM

Hmmmmmm... I went to Soyo's Bios Download page and they list a 5EMA+ or a 5EMA Pro, but not one with both + and Pro. You might try the "+" bios upgrade, but check your motherboard version to get the right one.

I've found that bios flashes usually kick the hard drive size support up higher. Did that for an old PCchips Pentium II board and was then able to install a 40Gb hard drive on it without using the Western Digital overlay program, which will degrade hard drive performance.

If you don't want to attempt a bios flash, you can always go here and download the DataLifeguard Tools, which will install the overlay program. The only other drawback to the overlay is that it only works with Win95, Win98, and Win ME, it won't work with NT, 2000 or XP. I'm guessing that's because it only works with FAT16 and FAT32, but not NTFS.

**MaxVal** · June 10th, 2002, 09:14 AM

W.D. disks are unusual in that they will not work alone when set as a master. A slave device must be present.
If you are running the disk alone, try removing the jumper.
MAX

**Brainchild** · June 10th, 2002, 09:34 AM

Yup, they hate to be alone, I think it's a security issue, anyways try the single setting, and also remove the jumper completely if that don't work.
I have had them to install windows, and all is well till they run the first time, and then get invalid system disk error. The jumper is wrong

Good luck

**Brangwen** · June 10th, 2002, 01:39 PM

"All My Pals:"

Thx for the advice & suggestions ... when I get back to that project, I will put all of your ideas to the test.

Re: "Plus & Pro" - I don't know ... I'll need to check that out, but I'm confident you're right.

Oh, and I'm running Win98se. I think the "master" alone problem may be the problem!

I'll post back.

Thx.

Brangwen