The entire Asus P2L97 series and all the variants like P2L97-S will
recognize hard drives to 124GB with an updated BIOS. The later BIOSes
issued after the board was out of production Asus  often called "Beta"
but they aren't really experimental. 

Early versions of these P2L97  boards often had a BIOS limit of 33GB

Asus TX97 series Socket 7 boards will only go to 33GB even with the
latest Asus "beta"  BIOS.

BIOS limits are not usually bugs most  (particularly the limits at
520MB 2.5GB around 9GB and 33GB are  because addressing schemes for
large IDE drives are series of  successive kludges on the original
1980s spec. No one expected hard drives to get so large.

There is a problem though in upgrading BIOS on some Asus
boards.Especially P2L97 series  and TX97 series Some of Asus versions
of Award Flash (with the very same download filename) falsely report
that the BIOS chip is of a type cannot be flashed.  

That's the root of this problem posted in this thread.

I have had success with Award Flash programs from the original  P2L97
and TX97 motherboard CDs also with flash programs from SOME Asus FTP
sites particularly their German website -which I haven't visited
recently-  Curious that flash programs that work have the same
filename than the ones that don't work. Also some generic flash
programs from Award work.

All the P2L97 series can if flashed with the latest BIOS work
perfectly with Celerons up to the 533MHz PPGA  in a simple inexpensive
Socket 370 to Slot One adapter. 

These are 66MHz FSB mainboards that work with most  PC55 PC100 or
PC133 SDRAM or EDO DIMMS up to 128MB pieces. They also support ECC
(error checking RAM)

The early AGP socket doesnt deliver sufficient current for GeForce or
Radon video cards but work well with most TNT cards, older Matrox
cards ATI rage based cards. They work especially well with surplus
Voodoo 3  4 and 5 cards which have very nice 2D and large monitor
support

As for 533MHz that's sufficient to run multimedia and DVD quite well,
broadband internet,  and virtually all serious apps.  I'd avoid Win XP
on this type of system as its a real reasource hog but Win2K works
great as do Win98SE Linux and BSD.

Heavy users of photoshop or the latest first person shooter real time
games or extensive video recording encoding probably need faster but
its easy to overestimate the significance of ATA100, 122MHz FSB  AGP4X
64MB video cards and the like.

The Asus P2L97 series boards are unusually stable hardware.

Mark Paulson

California

>Date:    Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:08:03 -0500
>From:    Rick Glazier <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Can't boot 40Gb on Asus P2L97 mobo
>
>Sounds like you now have the Award BIOS bug of around 32-33G
>limitation....     Seven Gigs is a lot to give up...
>
>I'd get a cheap ATA controller card and go the distance...
>
>PS: As I read your message, there is NO BIOS overlay, but you had
>to lie to the BIOS anyway with the jumpers... (?)
>
>                             Rick Glazier
>
>From: "Ian" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> Problem solved!
>>
>> Thanks to everyone who responded about this annoyance.
>>
>> The answer lay in limiting the drive capacity with its jumpers - as soon as
>> I did that, the 40G drive was instantly recognised.
>>
>> Sure, it's only as as a 33G, but I think I'll leave it that way - the
>> customer's original drive is only 2G so 33G is going to be a huge upgrade
>> for him.

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