Western Digital, Seagate, and Ez-Bios

[RodNichols5]

I have been using Western Digital hard drives for years now but lately I have been hearing how good Seagate is. I have had a 120Gig drive go out, still under warranty, so I was able to get a replacement, and I just got a new 160gig that I believe is having problems right away. I am thinking about returning it to Newegg and getting the comparable Seagate but here is my problem. I am running Ez-Bios in order to see all of the hard drives, I had a 60Gig master and 120Gig slave, now I have 120Gig master and 160Gig slave. Since I went over the 137Gig limit, I am running WinMe, I have been using Ez-Bios in order to get to all of the space. If I pull the WD 160Gig and replace it with a Seagate 160gig, will Ez-Bios cause a problem ? I mean, can I use the disc utilities that Seagate has for the Seagate drive, or will that conflict with Ez-Bios ? If so, can I just use Ez-Bios from WD on the Seagate ? I know I probably should just get a controller card but I wanted to see if Ez-Bios will work, as it has worked fine so far.

I hope this doesn't sound too confusing

I have an AMD Athlon on an ASUS MB, I believe the model is A7V333. I can confirm that if that is important.

Thanks in advance !!

[gmatov]

I'm pretty sure it will cause a problem, as the companies are unrelated, have different ways of tricking the OS to accept the new, fabricated drive parameters.

You post 98SE in your details.

Go to MS and look for a file for Large Drives, Numbered 263044USA8, or search for Large Drives. It will help you vreate a new Boot Disk, with a new Command Com and fdisk that can partition a large drive, what else.

One caveat is, when you run fdisk with the new boot disk, you will only see 5 digits, ie, your 160 gig, actually about 152 gig, will tell you you have 52 gig, or 52000megabytes to partition. Ignore that number, as soon as you get to under 100, it will display 5 digits still, say 97000 meg, or 97 gig.

If you wish to make one partition, ignore it, still, and it will fdisk, format 152 gigs.

I preach against the disk utilities, as they set the drive's parameters so only a machine with that utility set into the BIOS will read it properly. I lost a drive that way, once, and the WD tech said to send it back, I would not get any data off unless I ran Data Lifeguard on another machine.

Uninstall DLG from your machine before you work with the new drive.

BTW, you should enable S.M.A.R.T. in your BIOS, it checks your drive's health and alerts you if the drive begins to fail. I have had it tell me a drive was failing, to back up and replace. Standard on every MoBo I hve seen for the last 6 or 8 years. The tech is there, use it.

Cheers,

George