Hard Disk's LBA Trouble

[raheel123]

I have three 4GB harddisks with the same problem. they works fine with p4 but not with p1 which i need them to work for. they are LBA harddisks but the bios detects them as "normal".

The "fdisk" partitioning could not work up to the size but partitions to a smaller size for example if i wont two 50% partitions; I select the primary to be 50% (i.e 2GB), then the extended to 50%. then when i make logical partition, even if i select 100%( i.e the 2GB of the remaining) it wont get me that but instead i gets a logical partition of 2MB or so only.

Then the scandisk will show the message about "LBA not configured correctly... are u sure it is configured correctly...", if i click no it wont partition and windows 98 could not be installed. but if i click yes then at the surface scan after certain level it starts the bad sector marking which it wont never stop doing untill i give up and shuts it down undone. then install windows some how( because the rest of the scandisk was done so it will allow me to run windows setup)

then the windows is install, it runs well ,but after certain level of storage on the harddisk it stops working. and next startup will show message like "cannot read sector" etc.

now it should be noted that when i attach this harddisk as secondary HD on my p4, then run Winxp to partition or check for error etc , it just works fine. ( not to mention I once even made it primary and it got picked up without any LBA problems by the p4 bios)

here is the p1 configuration:

p1 intel mmx 233mhz

98mb ram

4mb VGA

intel motherboard.

award bios.

[jaclaz]

Things to do (in this order):

1) see if any BIOS update is available for the motherboard

2) check the hard disks with the manufacturer's testing utility

3) wipe them clean with Darik's Boot and Nuke

4) try re-formatting them

5) report progress

jaclaz