System Hangs

[Jono Clarke]

I am trying to install a 20 gigabyte hdd on my old Packard Bell with a Phoenix Bios 4.04, Agoura release 1.17. After I connected it up and started the machine with a boot disk I went into the Bios and auto found it but it only appeared as a 8 gigabyte drive. Then when the machine continued to start it just stopped with a flashing underscore instead of the A:\ prompt. I was going to use Disk Manager to partition and format the drive but now I can't. I have checked the boot up disk which works fine. Any help please?

[Sowulo]

Is this a new drive or one that already had a boot sector of some kind? Make sure your CMOS is set to boot to a floppy as the first option.

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[Jono Clarke]

Yes it is a new drive and the cmos is set to boot a-c

[KWB Teck]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Jono Clarke:
I am trying to install a 20 gigabyte hdd on my old Packard Bell with a Phoenix Bios 4.04, Agoura release 1.17. After I connected it up and started the machine with a boot disk I went into the Bios and auto found it but it only appeared as a 8 gigabyte drive. Then when the machine continued to start it just stopped with a flashing underscore instead of the A:\ prompt. I was going to use Disk Manager to partition and format the drive but now I can't. I have checked the boot up disk which works fine. Any help please?

</font>

Sounds like it's an older Packard Bell that might not support that large of a hard drive without a BIOS update. Can't help you with that without knowing which model you have, but you can look here for an updated BIOS.
http://www.windrivers.com/company/packbell/pbbios.htm

If there is an updated BIOS for your system that will support a 20gb drive then you should be able to boot your floppy to run the drive overlay installer since it probably still won't recognize more than 8gb in the BIOS Auto Detect.