Strange harddrive problem

[bevills1]

A strange hardrive problem arose when I upgraded an old NEC 350 MHZ computer to an Abit mobo. The BIOS recognized the drive, but Windows 2000 gave message that the drive may have a virus or jumpers incorrectly set on the Maxtor 6.2 GB drive on boot attempt. I tried several jumper settings in this older drive had different Master/Slave settings than newer Maxtors, but all other jumper settings tried had same results or drive wasn't recognized by BIOS. I was almost convinced I had a bad drive, but I decided to try the only other thing I could think to try which was reformat and install OS anew. Bingo! Everything worked normally from that point forward. The only thing I could reason that could cause such a problem was something put on that drive by NEC which caused incompatibility with newer mobo. Has anybody else experienced such problems, and do you think there is some other possible problem I may have missed?

[AlanHK]

If it was a very old MOBO, unable to cope with "large" drives, it may have needed a drive manager installed in the boot sector to basically override the BIOS.

I had some experience with this, a 486 couldn't use hard disks over 1 GB without this. So I installed a drive manager. Five years later, the PC dies, someone calls me up saying they can't get the disk working in a new PC. Finally worked it out.