Large Hard Drive issue

[shpanky]

hey folks,

I'm running into a problem with my new set up and thought you guys might be able to help.

I just recently did an upgrade with an MSI K8T800 mobo and Athlon 64 3200+ processor, and for some reason, win xp is not recognizing the 250gb hard drive I have in the box...it only recognizes it as about 128GB. Has anyone run into this with this mobo? I've read in other areas to upgrade the bios, but this mobo is so new, I'd have thought the bios would have already had large IDE drives enabled.

Has anyone come up with a solution to this? Thank you so much for any help you may be able to provide!


adam

 

[theslug]

It's not the board, it sounds like Windows isn't picking up the full drive because of the 137 GB barrier. I thought winxp had this enabled by default, but it sounds like it is not set to recognize drives over 137 GB. Are you trying to do a fresh install of windows XP to this drive or is it a second drive?

Here's some info on this type of problem.

 

[Peter]

Windows XP does not go beyond 128 GiB until you install Service Pack 1 and apply a registry change. This is well documented in the MS knowledge base.

 

[theslug]

While we're on the topic, if you try to install Windows to a drive over that size, does it even let you create a partition bigger than 128 or will that be the max? If it's 128, can you just install Windows, apply the registry change, and use a disk partition manager to resize the partition to use the entire drive?

 

[DieHardware]

Originally posted by: theslug
While we're on the topic, if you try to install Windows to a drive over that size, does it even let you create a partition bigger than 128 or will that be the max? If it's 128, can you just install Windows, apply the registry change, and use a disk partition manager to resize the partition to use the entire drive?

Yes

 

[BurningInferno]

I'm not too sure about it, but if you use partition magic under DOS you can create partitions bigger than 128gb. I have done so on my 160gb : 6gb primary, the rest extended with some logical drives. Whenever I run a disk doctor on Win9x or DOS, a message appears than there is an invalid extended partition, but I can access it correctly.

 

[Peter]

During installation, Windows XP will use its old IDE disk driver which will not use 48-bit LBA, and hence will not let you create a partition larger than 128 GiB. After updating XP to SP1 or later, you can then use a 3rd party tool to enlarge the partition, or make another partition in the newly uncloaked remaining capacity of the drive.

 

[Zap]

As others have said, if it is a clean install of Windows you will need an install CD that already includes SP1. Besides the other methods listed, one work-around is that if you are installing in such a way that you need to hit F6 to install additional HDD controller drivers (if running RAID or using a PCI add-on card) you will not encounter this problem. All recent drivers support 48 bit LBA without requiring Windows to have SP1.