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2TB drive, several years old Pentium 4 HP dc7100 machine with v 1.05 of the C786C1 BIOS. There is an 80GB SATA drive connected already, which is recognized, the 2TB drive comes up as 0 MB in the setup utility and prevents any further startup beyond the BIOS. Got version 2.15 of the bios from HP, Circa 2008, no change in behavior.

This Site mentions that "Big Drive" (48 bit addressing) has generally been supported since 2001, giving access to drives over 137 GB

Is this a BIOS problem? Could this hard drive require a more up to date SATA controller? Where do I find what storage addressing is supported by this BIOS?

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  • Which OS are you using? If you are not booting of the large drive (e.g. if you got Linux or BSD on the small drive and are just adding the second drive for data storage) then disable it in the BIOS. Your OS will still detect it and can use it just fine.
    – Hennes
    Aug 15, 2016 at 22:05

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If it is a Sata II drive and the motherboard sata ports are Sata I, you'll need to enable/change a jumper setting to run it in legacy mode (1.5Gb/s as opposed to 3Gb/s).

Some hard drives don't actually have a physical jumper (I think newer Western Digital ones don't) so you'll need to look into finding a hard drive firmware version that enables 'legacy mode'

Without knowing the brand of the hard drive I can't offer specific instructions. I've linked the jumper settings for Seagate Drives, it can be a bit hard to find these (In my experience) To find this link I Googled "Legacy Sata mode Seagate Hard Drive jumper settings"

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en

I hope this helps!

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  • I don't think you have to jumper them, most of the time the protocol will configure itself as sata I anyway, the jumper is generally only there when the controller can't handle the configuration request automatically.
    – Alex Berry
    Aug 3, 2012 at 11:16
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    Which might be the case Alex... :)
    – HaydnWVN
    Aug 3, 2012 at 11:41

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