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