Bios will not see hard drive help LEGACY

[New2IT]

I have a unique problem, I am working on a Agie Charmilles CNC EDM wire machine and the 40 gb Maxtor hard drive failed. I have tried to replace it with a brand new 80 gb Western Digital drive. The bios will not recognize the new drive. However when I put the old one back in the bios sees it and reads the size and brand. The EDM is running a FANUC motherboard, Phoenix Bios 4.0 Release 6.
I have plugged the new drive into another PC to verify a good drive. Agie Charmilles says it has to come from them "Proprietary" at $1100.00 for a 40gb ide hard drive. Can a motherboard have something on it that could make it only see a special hard drive. I'm lost @ this point. I do have a computer tech degree but this is new to me.

[Flibb]

I thought it might be one of the old problems with hard drive size limits caused by the bios. But I cant remember one that kicks in at 40 Gb. I have a laptop that cant handle over 30 Gb, ended up using drive overlay software.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/overDDO-c.html

[GoNz0]

chance is the old drives got a jumper for legacy mode ?

[blueball]

Worth a punt? -> http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...w=1386&bih=957

[New2IT]

I looked up the bios version and I think it should read up to a 128gb drive but not 100% on that. How do you jumper for legacy, I thought there was only master, slave, master with slave and c s. I'm running out of time on finding a solution, the company has a 1100.00 hard drive on the way from switzerland. This wouldbe a good chance for me to shine by saving them the money.

[peterb]

You could try partioning the 80GB drive into two 40GB partitions. OR if you have access to a Linux machine, use the hardparm utility to set a host proted area of 40 GB so the drive appears to be 40GB to a normal OS.

It may be that the BIOS is special to type and looks for a specific signature on the disk during start up.

[New2IT]

Agie Charmilles says the hard drive had to come from them, but I've never heard of coding bios to only read a certain drive other than by size of course in legacy systems.

[Sputnik]

I've heard of some photocopiers that do it too and they also charge a fortune for the 'genuine' part.

I was going to have a go at limiting them at the same size as the originals as said above but, I never got around to it so I'm none the wiser if it works or not.

Is it possible that the motherboard BIOS checks the firmware version on the drives to see if they are genuine?

[scaryjim]

Is it possible that the motherboard BIOS checks the firmware version on the drives to see if they are genuine?

I'm pretty sure this will be it: modified BIOS and drive firmware to ensure that only "genuine" components work. The company will no doubt claim it's to ensure stability and reliability because this way they can test every component. Nothing to do with tying you in to their ridiculously high component and service costs at all. Definitely not

if you've tried an alternate IDE drive and it's not even recognised in BIOS, I'd say it's a fair bet that they've pulled some kind of BIOS + firmware trickery to tie you in to using their very expensive spares. The only real chance you might have would be to try to find an identical replacement drive (i.e. same manufacturer, part number, etc) in case the BIOS only checks the drive ID and not some specially planted values in the drive firmware...

[shaithis]

Or if it's a problem with the mechanical part of the drive.....find a near-identical drive and swap the circuit boards.

[New2IT]

Thanks to all, several good ideas and lots of good info.

[vinnyT]

If none of the above works, when you get this super cost inflated hdd, clone it (with Acronis True Image (paid) or Macrium Reflect (free) if the bios is looking for sw on the hdd this should work, if it's hw based it will not) to another drive. This way you (may) be able to spare your Company the expense of a propriety hdd next time (there will be a next time, all hdds die eventually.)