Harddrive problems on old PC

lexor

lexor

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I got and old Pentium 2 MMX for my 3 year old son just to start learning the basics of computers.

The problem is that the PC cannot "see" a 80BG harddrive (but it recognizes an old 4GB HD).
I've changed the harddrive settings in the bios but without success.

Any ideas on how to get the 80GB HD to work ?

Thanks
 
does not support the drive

also dont you think 3 is a bit young to be learning computers

4-5 seems more like the age to teach kids, judging by fiancee's parents
 
See if you can still find a firmware update for your mobo. I remember a updates had to be performed to get large drives working (cat and mouse between mobo and drive manufacturers). Maybe consider getting a PCI SATA add-on card as well
 
You may be lucky, and be able to install a linux flavour on it (it should see the entire drive) or you could try some of the drive manufacturer tools as well - example: Seagate OnTrack Disk Manager for a Seagate Drive.
 
You can go ahead and format the drive in dos/during installation of the OS. The board/bios might not be able to see the whole drive but the OS will once installed
 
lexor that disc should have a jumper on that will put it in 33gb mode. You'll lose 50gb of the space but it will work.

If it's not the primary disc, you can use the full 80GB by not setting that jumper, provided the BIOS doesn't insist on autodetecting the drives. The BIOS interfaces on most Intel boards, Dells, ASUS boards (AMi I think) insist on doing this. The ones you find on the older Gigabyte boards (Award I think) doesn't - you just set it manually as not installed, make sure the IDE controller is enabled. Windows/Linux should happily pick it up as a secondary.
 
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