Several things to look for:
Instead of using autodetect, can you enter the # of cylinders, heads and
sectors data in the Standard Settings portion of the BIOS? Does the Bios
then display the correct size of hard drive? (From what I have found: If
the hard drive is not clean, the auto detect feature may not correctly
detect it. Also, there may be a problem with the amount of cache on the
hard drive. Some old BIOS systems do not recognize newer hard drives
because they can only work with a 500 KB cache. Newer drives may have a
much larger cache and when using the autodetect feature in BIOS, it
either displays a weird value for the drive [e.g. 2m:: GB] or it hangs
up.)

The BIOS has a HDD FORMAT LOW LEVEL feature. You may want to try
formatting the hard drive to clean it up (especially if it is from
another computer).

The data for the P2B motherboard
http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/mb_archives.htm (scroll down and you
will find the P2B series, select your board type and view the file)
indicates that it supports drives greater than 8.4 GB. But what was
greater than 8.4 at that time? You may have to make it think it has two
20's (one primary and one logical).

Just some thoughts about how to look at this.

Jean Bourvic

Bob Zuccarello wrote:
>
> Does anyone know what I need to do to use a 40gb drive on this mb? When I use autodetect...it just hangs at the primary master and never recognizes the drive. Do I need to update the bios?
>
>               The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
>                      support at our newest website:
>                           http://freepctech.com

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>