Asus P4P800 SATA

[premier69]

I have just installed a maxtor 250gb sata disk, already i have a few 160gb IDE disks working perfecly.

but just now when i booted up win2k sp4 it only found 128 on the sata disk, why's that?

I have a fairly new BIOS to, and anyways if it can handle 160gb disks of IDE why not sata?

yeah i just updated my bios using asus updater for updating the bios to the latest verion, the asus updater updates , by downloading a bios from the net and then updating the bios in windows then it asks to reboot and upon that in dos i get a message "cmos checksum bad" and i hit F1 do some settings and boot into windows.

now the asus updater says im using the latest version of the bios now.

but what does "cmos checksum bad" ??

and i still cant format the disk to more than 128gb.

in the bios it says the size of the hdd is 251gb so whats wrong with windows?

[LiquidSage]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...Ben-us%3B303013

will explain why you can't see more than 137 gigs. 48 LBA is not enabled by default. If you ever reinstall windows it must be XP SP1 or better with this setting enabled or you could have integrity problems with the partition. That said, it is much safer to divide your hd into a few partitions that are around 120 gigs so win2k SP3 / winxp sp1 and above can see them w/o any special considerations. An easy fix should be found at the hd maker's site via a utility that will enable you to activate 48 LBA mode. A quick one to use would be Maxtor's LBA fix found in utility downloads or 48bit check tool.

3rd party partition prog's that can work with your entire HD regardless of LBA setting that i know of:

Acronis Disk Director

Acronis Partition Expert

Paragon HD Manager

Power Quest Partition Magic

Your board CMOS error could be many things.Considering you did a BIOS update, it would not be surprising to see that. Anything from wrong date time to changed IRQ or power management setting could cause it. If you had your board OC'd through the BIOS and then updated, that could cause it as well. For what you did, just ignore it unless it keeps popping up.

[premier69]

Seems i was able to solve the problem going to maxtors homepage and downloading this:

big drive enabler.exe

once installed win had no problems finding the entire drive.

and about that cmos error thingie, i've never had it since the first reboot upon flashing.

I called the techie guys at ASUS and they didn't know why it said that when infact eveything is working as it should.

anyways, thank you for your help!

[maxamoto]

now the asus updater says im using the latest version of the bios now.

but what does "cmos checksum bad" ??

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, I get that too on my P4C800 Deluxe. As best as I can tell it's a bug in the BIOS, as it's plagued me since I bought the thing. Not to mention that making changes in the BIOS sometimes causes it to revert back to the factory settings. I've noticed that making any changes to the HDD settings will cause the checksum error, as well as wipe out any other custom configurations I've made to the BIOS. Decent board, but I'm less than thrilled about the software support for it. Asus seems to have slipped on this one issue, and I'm not too happy with the Promise drivers and their inability to install correctly (read: BSOD, file copy errors, etc) during an unattended setup. Heh, I'm not trying to whine