Can an old motherboard break a hard drive that's too large?

[FalseCathedral]

I know that may sound a little odd, but here's the situation (please bare with me, as i'm at work trying to recall this):

specs:
axp 2400+
abit (i think) mini atx nforce 420 D (newest bios and nvidia drivers)
windows xp sp2
2 80gb wd caviar se drives
dvd burner

I have an nForce 420D board..i can't remember the manufacturer right off the top of my head. The newest bios for it is several years old. 2002 i think...perhaps even 2001?
I have 2 WD 80gb SE drives working fine on my primary ide channel.
In the last 6 months, i have purchased 3 hard drives to use in this computer. one seagate 200gb, and two WD caviar 250gb drives. they all seem to have had the same problems.

i want to use them on my last ide slot, on the cable sharing my dvd burner. (note: i didn't purchase these drives at the same time, 1 of the WD 250gb's was RMAed). Right now, the seagate 200gb is sitting not being used.

here's the problem: at first, everything works fine. bios detects the drives ok, windows formats them ok...but that's when the problems start.

after i have everything setup ok...several things happen. and it seems to get progressivly worse. windows stops detecting the drives. windows says that it cant write to the drive (system tray tooltip popup thing), and then the bios stops detecting the drive (or will lock up with the drive plugged in).

those symptoms pretty much describe the things that have happend to each of those drives. my two 80 giggers work just fine n dandy.

here's my thought: could the motherboard's ide controler not know how to control the large drives properly, resulting in data errors? would buying a new motherboard potentially solve this problem? i'm on a limited budget, and i found an nforce2 400 ultra for $40...so i may get that and try it out. what are your thoughts?

once again, i apologise if i wasn't very clear. also, sorry for the spelling and typos...i'm trying to get this written at work quickly so i can hopefully have some more info to help me troubleshoot when i go home tonight. Thanks in advance!

[pstang]

sounds like the ide controller is going bad imo... best thing would be to get a new mobo

[dirtydr]

I'd lean towards pstang's initial assessment. Do you have another machine available to test the drives?

First thing I would try to do is swap the cable. Second toss the drives in another machine. That should isolate the problem to either the cable (the problem is solved), drive (problem still exists on other machine) or controller (if steps 1 & 2 are ok). If it is the controller cashing out, you could pickup a pci ide card for $15 - $25... not the sexiest solution but it would be the cheapest.

[defakto]

I agree with the initial above also, another problem could be a crappy powersupply causing issues too

[FalseCathedral]

hmm, thanks guys! i think i'm gonan go with a $40 nforce2 ultra 400...the usb 2.0 support and overclocking support will be a welcome bonus!

...well, that is, after i test the drives in another computer. :-p

[drizzt81]

I had a similar issue a couple of years ago with a large (>138GB) drive. I had data on it, formatted on a controller that supported "really really big" drives. Put it onto an old system and suddenly everything snafu'd. I wondered what happend, so I did a defrag - which was the WORST thing to do. Since my controller did not know how to send addresses greater than (32 bit?!) the upper bunch of bits (I guess 48 - 32 = 16) were randomly set. This may be happening to your drive as well. Since the drive randomly accesses different blocks on the disk, it may appear corrupt on this particular controller, while being perfectly fine in reality.

You need to test it on a controller supporting large LBA or whatever it's called. If formatting+putting data on and reading from there works fine, it's your mobo.