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pamcr

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120gig Maxtor hard drive seen as 39.49 gig capacity only.

I have installed & removed & reinstalled a brand new 120gig Maxtor IDE hard drive and Windows XP disk management says it's only 39.49gig.  I have an ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard computer (built in Dec 2003) and have flashed the bios but it didn't totally update, although it said it should read 120gig hard drives.  It is a secondary drive, I have formatted it and partitioned it, but can't get anything more out of it than 39gig.  What do I try next?
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Sam Cohen
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tosh9iii

MaxBlast 3
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

"Breaks the 528 MB, 2.1 GB, 4.2 GB, 8.4 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB and 137 GB capacity barriers. "
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Callandor, ive just said that
tosh9iii, Thanks for the aid ... I couldnt get the site info out, but if Pmcr boought the Maxtor HD , retail, then he should already have the MAx3 cd
Sorry, all4artz, you gave a general advice to check the jumpers, but many people might not know  what jumpers settings are available.  If I said "check the hard drive", that could cover a lot of things, too.  I didn't repeat what you said just because I had nothing else to say, I elaborated on it.  I'm sure you can appreciate the efforts of other experts who have a different perspective.
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ASKER

The only jumper I know about is the one for the master/slave setting.  I purchased the hard drive from a friend so didn't get a CD.  The BIOS identifies the hard drive with the  Maxtor 120 name, but says it is 33822MB. I went to ASUS support site and downloaded the latest BIOS update, but when I did the update there were 2 blue blocks showing it didn't update although the rest was white, and when I restarted WinXP said it found new memory hardware and installed it but nothing has changed with the hard drive.
There is something going on, if the BIOS won't update using Asus' own files.  The key seems to be this failed flash, which in itself is a scary thing, because a failed flash usually renders a motherboard inoperable.  Download the BIOS again, in case you got a corrupted file, and try resetting the BIOS before flashing.
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ASKER

Sorry I don't quite understand what you mean by resetting the BIOS before flashing.  Should I flash the bios using my old BIOS file, and then flash the BIOS with the newly downloaded file?  I am afraid to do this too often in case I totally lose my motherboard, can that happen? (It will probably take me a day or 2 to work up the nerve to try this).
I was thinking about just using the reset jumper, but now that you mention it, a flash with the original BIOS may be in order, because it's fouling up with the new one.  You can lose the motherboard if the flash process is interrupted, which is why I am amzed you have survived up to this point.  Get a UPS and hook it up to it, if you don't want to take any chances.  The flash takes less than a minute, so just be careful.
Before you flash look at this
here is a snapshot of the jumpers:

 1 2 3     4

 * * *    *
 * * * * *        <-------Label is faced up, and power is to the right of jumpers

 5 6  7 8 9

ONly One Cap should cover over jumpers 1 and 5  for master
Or Put Only ONe cap over jumpers 2 and 3 if you wish to have it as slave
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ASKER

Thank you very much for the diagram all4artz, all I received was the hard drive, no documentation.  When I checked the hard drive jumpers I thought they were on cable select but they were on cap limit.  I set them for slave and the bios saw the full size right away.  Also thanks Callandor I have upgraded my BIOS properly now so have ended up with 2 solutions that have improved things immensely.
Thanks again.
No Problem

I thought i gave the answer first thought:
I said:
 < MAke sure that your jumpers on the HD are set correctly> HD means Hard drive
Callandor said:
< You need to check the jumpers>
Am i Missing something here???
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ASKER

This was my first attempt at this so forgive me for not assigning the points properly.  I didn't realize the jumpers on the hard drive had anything to do with capacity reading until I also read the comments from Callandor, but on the other hand I didn't resolve the issue till I received your last comment with the diagram so I think you should get more points but I don't know how to go about that now.  Sorry.
Yes, the post I made was specifically about capacity limit settings on some drives (I don't recall if they are called that), because I thought all4artz's reference to jumpers might have been taken as just making sure you had it set for master or slave.  Some drives like IBM have multiple jumpers allowing you to set both, and I had no way of knowing if that was what he meant, so I clarified, which I think was warranted, given the way you took it.

If you want to reassign points, you can do so by posting in Community Support.