[plug] Big HDD in SFF PC

[Nathan D]

Evening all,

Another quick and easy pc mission has turned into much frustration and
I am now turning to the list for help.

I have a SFF ASUS P2L-N that has been running IPCop for my home
firewall.  I was given a 20Gb laptop drive some time ago and it worked
quite good until recently.  It had been dropped before it had been
given to me so I was always unsure of it, but I got 2 1/2 years out of
it before too many bad sectors became an issue.  An old 233 machine
has been a temporary firewall while I have played around with the
faulty hard drive.

Finally realising that hard drive is not able to be used I have
purchased a new Seagate ST94813A 40GB 2.5" drive, but have had no joy
with it.  I spent a long time trying different options in the BIOS to
get the drive seen, but none have worked.  Seagate Disc Wizard
software was loaded onto floppies and the drive was seen and
partitioned ok.  All fixed :)

A quick install of IPCop 1.4.11 and all is looking good.  Eject the CD
and reboot and all I still get is "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM
DISK AND PRESS ENTER".  By changing settings to 'Auto' in the BIOS I
can make the machine hang while it tries to auto detect.

I know that I could probably find a way to boot from a floppy, but is
there any way to make the new hdd work in this machine?
The most current BIOS that I could find (1005) was loaded when I first
got this machine.  The only options that I can see right now are
either getting hold of a second hand smaller hdd, or maybe another
(newer) SFF machine?

Easy solutions are being sought :)

regards,
  Nathan D.

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natdan at gmail.com
2000+ Mbs of email !!
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