Hard Disk Upgrade

[Andrew Dickson_1]

I have a HP Vectra VE 4/166 2.1G. I asked a local computer shop to install an additional 40G for storing graphic images, but they have told me that they can only install a maximum of 8G (and 8G drives are as rare as hens teeth) and even if they install the 40G drive the computer only sees 8G. Is this a typical situation with the Vectra VE. Do I need to upgrade the whole system (motherboard included) to get a larger disk?
Thanks

[Victor Vicente Sandoval]

Hi Andrew;

You need to upgrade just the BIOS chip, but you need to contact to hp support in order to asking if there is an upgrade or patch for this chip.


Regards !

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Andrew,
go to http://h20004.www2.hp.com/soar_rnotes/bsdmatrix/matrix32471en_US.html and get bios image (gp.05.07, 26-Mar-97, English). Then flash motherboard's NVRAM. If it will not help - replace motherboard with newer one which supports big disks.
One more possibility exists though... I remember there were disks from Western Digital (it was ~8 years ago...) and they have special software enclosed on the diskette called 'Ontrack disk manager' (or something like this) which actually writes its driver into disk boot area and when booting from disk machine loads this driver which replaces built-in system call procedures and supports big disks
Eugeny

[Tim Sanko]

I would add a different IDE controller and bypass the mother board.

It will work if you don't mind spending $15 - $30.00.

Tim