There's a third possibility that wound up biting me a couple years ago.
(This was with a Gateway not an HP but if it's that old it may have the
same problem) - the motherboard simply can't handle a drive larger than
2GB. Note that I said mother board. No amount of Bios flashing will work
- it fries before even getting to the Bios. Can't even get the Bios up.
I had to jumper the drive to cripple it to 2GB before it would come up.
If the mother board sees more than 2GB it freezes dead.

Denys Beauchemin wrote:
>
> Dear Miffed :),
>
> You have fallen into the gray area where disk drives jumped from under the 800
> MB limit of the traditional addressing to the LBA method.  As you properly
> diagnosed, your system is unable to do anything with this drive because of its
> size.  There are several avenues to explore:
>
> 1- OnTrack software may have an overlay that will enable access to the drive.
>  It's nasty but it works.
> 2- You can find out which BIOS is running on your HP and contact the BIOS
> manufacturer for an update.  This might be a PROM or a flash program.  This may
> also cost money.
> 3- Swap out the motherboard on the system with a new one of the same format.  I
> would recommend ASUS or Tyan.
> 4- Get a new computer.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Denys. . .
>
> Denys Beauchemin
> HICOMP
> (800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
> denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:   Gary Sielaff [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent:   Friday, November 03, 2000 11:22 AM
> To:     [log in to unmask]
> Subject:        OT very much OT
>
> I have emailed HP PC tech supt. but to no avail.  They
> won't answer or don't know the answer... anyway.. and
> if I'm out of order let me know...
> My 840 meg drive went bad in my vectra xm 5/120 series 4
> and I put a 4.3 in its place..  The p/c won't have anything
> to do with it.. I fdisked and formatted for two 2 gig partitions
> but still nothing.  Looked on the support pages for a
> bios flash to enable LBA but nothing.... Question .. does
> anyone know if HP has a bios upgrade to handle large
> disks?
> Miffed in Moses Lake
> Gary