Replacement Hard Drive Rejected by BIOS

[JackNoble]

The hard drive failed in my HP desktop.  I replaced the 1TB OEM Seagate ST31000524AS with a known good Western Digital  1TB WD10EZEX-00BN5A0 and was presented with an error message from the BIOS that the new drive was too large  so I was unable to load the operating system.    What could be causing this error message??

[mdklassen]

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@JackNoble wrote:

The hard drive failed in my HP desktop. 

I replaced the 1TB OEM Seagate ST31000524AS with a Western Digital  1TB WD10EZEX-00BN5A0

and was presented with an error message from the BIOS that the new drive was too large 

so I was unable to load the operating system.   

What could be causing this error message??

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If you are correct, the BIOS is causing the error-message.

What is the exact wording of the error-message?

As to "why", I don't know, but ...

Your computer: HP Pavilion p6-2103w Desktop PC Product Specifications

has this motherboard; HP and Compaq Desktop PCs - Motherboard Specifications, H-CUPERTINO2-H61-uA TX

and your computer's original (in 2012) specifications state:

Hard drive
• Size: 1 TB
• Interface: SATA
• Rotational Speed: 7200 rpm

Look carefully at the gummy labels on both disk-drives, for the number of "heads" and "cylinders" and "sectors".

Multiply the three numbers together, and multiply by 512 (each sector is 512 bytes) to get the count of bytes on each disk-drive.

Or, see: https://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda%207200.12/100529369b.pdf

Drive specification: ST31000528AS
Formatted capacity (512 bytes/sector) - 1000 Gbytes
Guaranteed sectors - 1,953,525,168
Heads - 4
Discs - 2
Bytes per sector - 512
Default sectors per track - 63
Default read/write heads - 16
Default cylinders - 16,383

versus: https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-2411668183-eng_spec_data_sheet_2879-771436.pdf

WD10EZEX

Capacity - 1,000,204 MB

Yes, slightly larger than 1 TB.

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So, it could be a limitation in the old (2012) motherboard.

Looking at: Cupertino-H61/Cupertino2-H61 Motherboard BIOS Update

Type: BIOS
Version: 7.16 Rev. A
Operating Systems:Windows 7 (64-bit)
Release date: Aug 14, 2012
File name:  sp58264.exe (2.9 MB) 
 

this BIOS update does not explicity address the upper-limit of "exactly" 1 TB.

There are no other BIOS updates.

Can you return the WD disk-drive, and get the (slightly smaller) SEAGATE 1TB disk-drive?

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[JackNoble · Accepted solution]

I did acquire an exact replacement for the Seagate drive and the BIOS did accept it so the issue is resolved.  The WD drive was installed as a backup so it was put to use.  It is still a mystery as to why the BIOS is so fussy since the formatted capacity of the two drives is EXACTLY the same.  The only difference that I could find between the two drives is that the Seagate drive had a 32MB cache while the Western Digital drive has a 64MB cache.  I did find upon close examination of the OEM drive a small sticker containing the text "FW update HP64"  but the new Seagate drive did not contain this sticker and it worked so ???

Thanks very much for your efforts.