[Ding A Ling]

Hi Guy's.......can ya help a 'Newbie'
Deceided to learn (DiY PC) before I retire/dementia gets me, I've got a Via Technologies VT8363 motherboard to play with and wish to raise it from 20 to 320G HD (I've successfully raised RAM to the max 1*5G, straight forward enough) but the new Hard Drive won't play ball, is there a max limit for this model of Board? (i couldn't find one on any spec lists that i searched) if so, what is it and where do I look it up?
Here's looking forward to your input,
Cheers,
Ding A Ling.

[Digerati]

VT8363 is actually the chipset on your motherboard.

Note that older boards (and earlier verisions of Windows) did not support drives larger than 137Gb. Some boards supported a newer BIOS that would allow large drive support, and later versions of Windows do support it. So make sure you have the latest BIOS update for your board. Then see How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP.

[Ding A Ling]

OK Digerati,
(remember i'm a PC newbie) where do I look-up the latest BIOS for my M'board and currently, I run on XP (SP2)....................as a last resort, if I 'partitioned' the H'Drive at say 128G would this bypass my problems?
Ding.

[Digerati]

BIOS updates can be found on the motherboard maker's website. But you have to identify the maker first.

And yes, you can partition the drive in to 3 (or more) partitions, each less than 137Gb and it should work fine. This is typically done by temporarily installing the drive in another machine.

[Ding A Ling]

Neat Digerati,
I feel an intense weekend comming on, lets rip that box to pieces ! ! YEA........................

[Digerati]

Keep us posted.