I have a Biostar M7NCD Motherboard. I bought this motherboard a 10
months ago.
First off, you should not try to install and run the drive
with a single partition that large even if the OS and BIOS
were happy with it.. It will result in very large cluster
sizes and a huge waste of hard drive space as well as
slowing the machine. You need multiple partitions. You
should attempt to keep the primary (boot) partition
relatively small and use it for the OS and other software
that must be installed there. Other applications should be
in a second, third or ?? partition. I personnally prefer to
keep partitions no larger than 20GB because of backup and
other operations - there are many opinions about that. It
also helps limit the damage and data loss in some crashes
where recovery is possible. I have a couple of larger
partitions that are needed for rendering video. This is the
only use I have ever had that needed larger partitions.
IIRC, the largest partition that you can use with ME is 32
GB any way you go at it with FAT32.
The problem you will face with your OS is the primary
partition. If you do not want to D/L the manufacturer's
disk utilities to do this, you can use Fdisk to partition
the disk with a suitably sized primary partition and format
it as the Boot or system partition. What is left of the
hard drive can be partitioned and formated with Fdisk as an
extended partition which can contain several logical
partitions, if need be, so that they do not exceed the
maximum size for the OS. You will need to make a boot disk
containing the fdisk and format utilities to accomplish
this. Next, you will need a bootable version of your OS
disk to install your Win ME.
The manufacturers disk utilities can do all of this for you
if you already have ME installed on a hard disk and want to
maintain all of your setups as they are. They are usually
free to D/L from their web site. You will need to
temporarily install both hard disks with the new drive first
being installed as a secondary unit. You can then replicate
the drive without changing anything on your old drive.
After the new drive is setup and the old hard drive copied
to it, you will have to remove it and change the jumpers to
make it a primary drive and install it in the place of the
old drive. Your machine should then boot and run. If the
disk is not recognized by the BIOS which should be visible
during bootup, you will need to use the disk manager utility
from the disk manufacturer unless you have a thrid party
manager.
If you are going to copy Win XP, it is an entirely different
process that can get complicated. If you have ME there now,
you are best to complete your hard drive installation and
duplication with ME and, then, install the XP version as an
upgrade to keep it simple and keep your other software
operating properly.
