• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

If You Are Familiar With A Tyan Trinity 400 (S1854) Motherboard...

T

tb75252

Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2011
Messages
11
Hi. Moderately experienced computer "tweaker" here.

I have a desktop with a Tyan motherboard (Trinity 400 - S1854) that was purchased back in 1999. The chipset is VIA Apollo Pro 133A, the BIOS (Award 4.51PG) is v. 1.07 released on 5/11/2000.
Here is a link to the Tyan site for this motherboard: http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/trinity400.html
It currently has an 80GB IDE/PATA internal hard drive.

Does anyone know the maximum hard drive size supported by this motherboard and BIOS? I cannot find such information on the user manual! (Ideally, I would like to install a 250-500GB hard drive...)

What are my options for upgrading the hard drive? (Internal PCI controller card with IDE/PATA interface, maybe? Which brand supports such an old motherboard? Should I be looking for a controller card with an on-board BIOS?)

I am sure I will have more questions later...
 
Not your particular motherboard, but lots of boards in this timeframe.

If you're lucky and Tyan has kept up with its BIOS upgrades, your limit should be about 130 GB or so out of the BIOS. I'd be surprised if Tyan implemented the ATA6 extensions.

I think you'll take a price hit with a 500GB PATA drive. Maybe you should consider a SATA adapter as that's where the bargains are. But ATA6/UDMA133 controllers are available.

You didn't say what OS you wanted to run--that matters.

I can commiserate. I've just gotten a SuperMicro P6DGE Rev. 3 motherboard and am setting it up to use two 1GHz P3 Slot 1 Coppermines (the board allows for running the 440GX chipset at 133MHz).

So I'll be thinking about you while I'm swearing at this thing... :)
 
Last edited:
Chuck(G) said:
Not your particular motherboard, but lots of boards in this timeframe.

If you're lucky and Tyan has kept up with its BIOS upgrades, your limit should be about 130 GB or so out of the BIOS. I'd be surprised if Tyan implemented the ATA6 extensions.

I think you'll take a price hit with a 500GB PATA drive. Maybe you should consider a SATA adapter as that's where the bargains are. But ATA6/UDMA133 controllers are available.

You didn't say what OS you wanted to run--that matters.

I can commiserate. I've just gotten a SuperMicro P6DGE Rev. 3 motherboard and am setting it up to use two 1GHz P3 Slot 1 Coppermines (the board allows for running the 440GX chipset at 133MHz).

So I'll be thinking about you while I'm swearing at this thing... :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the commiseration! :)

I actually have Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit, of course) installed right now. I can't claim that the computer is fast, but it works okay.
Do you know of a SATA adapter that has an on-board BIOS? I don't think that the Award BIOS would know what to do with the SATA drives...
 
I've got several older P3/P4 workstations with the same problem. I've installed PCI SATA cards in them, and installed small industrial Flash modules as the first IDE device. This allows me to use the Flash module as the /boot partition under Linux or OpenBSD and put everything else on the SATA disk. I'm not sure if that's an option for you with Windows, but PM me if you need some IDE Flash modules, as I have > 100!
 
Glitch has the right idea. There are some cheap VIA RAID boards (3 SATA+1 IDE usually) on eBay that contain no BIOS. So what you do is boot from a small PATA drive (SSD or CF is fine) and then allow Windows to load the SATA driver.

Wim's BIOS also detailed a procedure for splicing in a BIOS driver for the SATA board into your current BIOS. It's a little complicated, but I've done it with a ASUS P5A K6 board successfully.
 
If it were me I would simply plug a drive in that was bigger than 127gb and see what happens. I have had my share of surprises with older stuff like that actually working just fine with 127+ gb drives.
 
lutiana said:
If it were me I would simply plug a drive in that was bigger than 127gb and see what happens. I have had my share of surprises with older stuff like that actually working just fine with 127+ gb drives.
Click to expand...

Well, you can say that again! I did a BIOS update on a Gigabyte 440LX board that claimed to support 128GB drives. Well, yes and no--you can enter the drive parameters, everything's fine until you next cycle power or reset--then the hard drive reverts to 8GB. Confuses the heck out of GRUB and no amount of BIOS option twiddling does a thing.

Surprises go both ways.... :sigh:
 
So, you guys feel reasonably confident that my motherboard/BIOS can support a drive up to 128GB?
I might give that a try first and see what happens. Switching from an 80GB hard drive to a 120GB one would mean a 50% storage increase... Not a bad deal!
I am afraid, that the methods suggested by Glitch and Chuck are over my head...

Anyone knows a good (i.e. reputable!) source of used computer parts in the Dallas, Texas, area? :)
 
tb75252 said:
I am afraid, that the methods suggested by Glitch and Chuck are over my head...
Click to expand...

Not so difficult... Start by keeping your 80GB drive attached and Win7 installed. Then get one of these, which will set you back $6. Attach any SATA drives or even a spare IDE drive and feed Windows the setup CD when (or if) it asks for drivers. Use the Computer Management Administrative tools to set the drive(s) up the way you'd like them. Easy!
 
If you have a 120gb and/or 160gb drive lying around, give them a try. I'd say that if 80gb works then the 120gb will work fine. Also if the 160gb works then pretty much any IDE drive should work since the next barrier is somewhere around 2tb. The absolute best way to find out if a drive will work is to plug it in and see.

Just an FYI the most common BIOS HDD barriers were/are:

  • 528Mb (The 1,024 Cylinder Barrier)
  • 2.11Gb (The 4,096 Cylinder Barrier)
  • 8.46Gb (The Int 13 Interface Barrier)
  • 33.8Gb (The 65,536 Cylinder Barrier)
  • 137Gb (ATA Interface Limit)

Here is a great website that has tons of info on all the barriers (there are a lot more than I mentioned).http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size_MB504.htm
 
Last edited:
Under Windows XP, you could have a larger than 120GB drive paired with a smaller drive that loads the OS. I have an older P3 system that uses a 60GB drive to load XP but all the data is stored on a 250 GB. Worked fine (but was slow) except that once the small hard drive failed the larger hard drive is not longer recognized by the system. I expect Windows 7 can do the same thing. Of course, your case needs to be able to have 2 hard drives installed.

In terms of drives, I would recommend buying a new drive since it will probably be more reliable and cheaper than a used one. A new (albeit recertified) 120GB IDE runs about $30.
 
krebizfan said:
I expect Windows 7 can do the same thing.
Click to expand...

It does, during setup you can specify the second drive to install to, and it will then put all the boot stuff on the primary drive and the rest on the second drive. This is not ideal because if something happens to the primary drive you won't be able to boot the system. 80gb is plenty of space for Windows 7, what I would do is install it onto the 80gb drive, then simply redirect the user folder to the second (larger) drive, and when installing applications, point them to the second drive as well.
 
lutiana said:
80gb is plenty of space for Windows 7
Click to expand...
When I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on the 80GB hard drive (had to do a clean install because I had Windows XP on it before), I was expecting it to have a footprint of about 16-20GB. Instead it hogs close to 40GB!! (Even after having deleted the Windows.old folder) :-(
 
tb75252 said:
When I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on the 80GB hard drive (had to do a clean install because I had Windows XP on it before), I was expecting it to have a footprint of about 16-20GB. Instead it hogs close to 40GB!! (Even after having deleted the Windows.old folder) :-(
Click to expand...

That sounds about right, though I did install Windows 7 Pro (x86) on a 20gb HDD, and there was only about 1gb free when I was done. Did you format the drive first? And did you delete and disable the restore points in Win XP before installing 7?
 
lutiana said:
Did you format the drive first? And did you delete and disable the restore points in Win XP before installing 7?
Click to expand...
No to both questions... I knew that when upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 I would have to go with the Custom install option. I was assuming that Windows 7 would take it from there.
 
tb75252 said:
No to both questions... I knew that when upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 I would have to go with the Custom install option. I was assuming that Windows 7 would take it from there.
Click to expand...

In Windows explorer right click on the drive and select properties, under the diagram of disk use there is a cleanup tool, click on it and let it scan the drive and delete all the old stuff. There is also an option to delete all restore points on there somewhere, I'd use this as well. Also there is an option to scan system folder, I'd make sure that is checked as well. Hopefully this will gain you some space.
 
lutiana said:
In Windows explorer right click on the drive and select properties, under the diagram of disk use there is a cleanup tool, click on it and let it scan the drive and delete all the old stuff. There is also an option to delete all restore points on there somewhere, I'd use this as well. Also there is an option to scan system folder, I'd make sure that is checked as well. Hopefully this will gain you some space.
Click to expand...
Thanks! I'll give it a try this evening.
I did run CCleaner several times though, so I do not expect miracles...
 
Re-install Windows and tell it to put the user folders (\documents and settings\...) on the second drive; as well as any program files you install and your temp files. Basically, use the primary drive for Windows system and swap files, but not for user files and installed program files.

It works great. Trying to move user files after installation to a different drive is a pain, but I've done it.
 
Come to think of it why do you need a larger drive? 80gb should be fine for Windows 7, a 120gb even better. What do you intend to do with the system that you would need 500+gb of space?

Another option is to put multiple 120Gb (or 80gb since we know for a fact they work with the BIOS) drives in the system and forget about add on cards. Assuming you have a single IDE CD-Rom, you could put in 2 extra IDE drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top