Member Avatar for lillie822

I am trying to install a new 250 GB EIDE hard drive (Western Digital WD2500JB) on my 5+ year old Dell Dimension 800 Mhz computer. My old hard drive had been connected to the motherboard through a Promise Ultra66 controller card. I connected my new hard drive the same way (so that it is the only hard drive on the system) but the computer is only recognizing around 32 GB of the drive. I contacted Promise, who said that the Ultra66 does not support a hard drive as large as 250GB, but they never got back to me when I asked them whether there was an update for my card that would increase its limit.

(I have already tried running Western Digital's Data Lifeguard on my motherboard's bios, so I was able to get the motherboard to recognize the full size of the hard drive instead of the 131GB limit that it *had* been imposing, but now I am stuck at this 32 GB limit.)

So right now I'm wondering, is there a way to update my controller card so that it can handle a 250 GB hard drive?

If not, I don't know what to look for in a new controller card so that I get one that works with my motherboard and will also handle my new hard drive.

Any advice would be great... I'm feeling very stuck and I don't know what to do. thanks in advance. :)

--Liz

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by GrumpyOleMan
Member Avatar for GrumpyOleMan

Hi,
You need a Promise Ultra133 TX2 PCI IDE Controller Card! Copy this into the google search engine. You should find lots of places selling the card from $40 to $50 dollars! The Card can easily handle your 250 GB hard drive and way, way, way bigger hard drives also (144 Petabytes - 144 PB's - 144 million GB's, according to the manual)!! Hope this helps anybody that reads this!

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