If you know the brand of motherboard you have, you get your upgraded BIOS by
going to the web site of that motherboard (and hope that the BIOS upgrade
allows recognition of hard drives larger than 2.5GB.)

If you do not know the brand of motherboard you have, your first task is to
find out. The reason for this is that most, if not all, motherboard
manufacturers modify the BIOS they use from Award (or AMI, or Phoenix, etc.) to
customize it for *their* motherboard. Therefore, trying to use a "generic"
newer Award BIOS could very well result in an unusable motherboard -- not a
good thing.

The easiest way (other than the manual) of finding out who made your
motherboard, and whether there is a BIOS upgrade available to it is to go to
Wim's BIOS page.  He has assembled a vast amount of resources dedicated to
identifying "generic" motherboards, and either has the upgraded BIOS for them
on his site, or has links to web sites of these motherboards.  Wim's BIOS page
is at:

http://www.ping.be/bios/

On that page start with the "BIOS Numbers" link, which will explain how to find
out who made your motherboard.

If this works, and you end up with a BIOS capable of supporting large drives,
you still have the problem Jim Meagher mentioned earlier.  You'll have to
uninstall the partitioning software you originally used (probably EZDrive, or
something similar), and repartition and reformat your hard drive.  And then
reinstall everything.

I HATE partitioning software.

The other option, if you cannot find a BIOS upgrade for your motherboard, is to
purchase an EIDE or UIDE controller card that takes over the hard drive I/O
functions from your motherboard, and has its own BIOS on board to allow for
direct recognition of large hard drives.  Promise Technologies has some very
good controller cards for that purpose.  Use of a controller card does NOT
cause the problems that use of partitioning software, and is the second best
choice (after upgrading your BIOS).

Roxanne Pierce
R2 Systems, San Diego
mailto:[log in to unmask]

On Sunday, March 08, 1998 18:55, Nicolas Cure [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
wrote:
> I have an Award BIOS dated 12/19/95 and I bought a 6.4 GB HDD from
> Western Digital. The BIOS doesn't recognize the drive correctly and so
> when I installed the drive with the included utility it installed a BIOS
> so that the computer would use the drive correctly. The problem is that
> with this software I can't use Partition Magic on that drive because it
> gives me an error #116 which says that "partition tables begin and start
> inconsistent". I guess I need an upgraded BIOS so that I won't have to
> use the utility that came with the HDD and that way I will use DOS's
> fdisk and format commands. The question is where and how can I get the
> BIOS upgrade.
>
> I would appreciate any help.
>
> TIA
> Nicolas Cure