BIOS Limitation Software
 

I've posted recently about the weird noises coming from the pc, and in the end it was the hard drive. it was going out.

so, i'm going to replace it, but i have a problem.

i just found out that the bios on the pc has a hd limit of 17 gigs, and i'm thinkin of getting a 40-60 gig one, as OEM.

so, anyone know where i can find any of these bios limitation software that'll get past the bios limit?

It depends on the BIOS; you MAY bea able to flash the BIOS to upgrade it, if not, there's a way that you can "fool" some BIOS into thinking that the HD is smaller than it really is. Or you could just run 2 - 17 Gb hd's.

maxblast
 

maxtor has a program for their hard drives called maxblast that can install a soft bios on the boot partition to override bios limitations on hard drive size. I wouldn't recommend trying the program with other manufactureres devices, but i've seen it work many a time for maxtor oem and white label drives off pricewatch.
It will support anything up to 120gb and 7200rpm drives as well as udma 4 for most motherboards.
Just make sure your os can support the drive and this soft bios can be pretty successsfull at bypassing hardware limits.
It's actually one of the reasons i'm loyal to maxtor, and i'm rarley loyal to anyone. These babies just never fail in the graphic rendering business, unlike the four WD's one non-graphic computer went through at my house in two years.

Re: maxblast
 

AGREED IN SPADES! I've got a Maxtor HD (or two) in every box I own, except my server; it's got a 9Gb Seagate SCSI drive I got REAL cheap; it also sounds like an F-18 winding up at boot time. I wasn't aware that MAX blast had that capability, but I never had a BIOS linitation problem either.

If you run linux, installed with a small boot partition, it will probably work fine. Linux does not use the BIOS once the kernel is loaded.