My Sata Drive only Showing Half Capacity in Windows Setup With ABIT NF-95 and Maxtor 200 GB Drive

[BraveSirRobbin]

Hello;

I just purchased an ABIT NF-95 Motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ processor, 1GB DDR 400 Kingston Ram and also have a Maxtor SATA ATA/150 200 GB drive. I put this in an Antec Sonata case with a 380 Watt Antec Truepower 2.0 supply.

All went together well, and the bios shows the SATA drive as it should (shows as IDE3 in the bios).

I also installed the latest bios for the mobo.

I have only one IDE device (DVD-Rom) and it is set as the primary in the first IDE slot.

I have the SATA in the first SATA motherboard socket.

Problem I'm having when Windows XP installer starts, I DO NOT press F6 to install a third party (i.e. SATA) driver and let windows proceed to the format drive section.

There it shows the drive as being only 131 GB and not 200 GB.

There were no SATA drivers that came with the mobo and according to the forums I've read (including ABIT's) as long as I have the RAID features disabled, I should NOT need SATA drivers and the drive should show as an IDE primary in Windows.

I even tried forcing the drive's SATA speed to 150 via a jumper with the same results. I did see a Maxtor firmware issue in the forums with NForce chipsets, but this seemed to only be needed for people that could not get the drive to be recognized at all during the Windows install process.

There was NO floppy install disk that came with the mobo (i.e. SATA drivers) and I could not find them on ABIT's site.

Any thoughts from the experts here? Appreciate any help given!

Thanks,

BSR

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Could this be a service pack two issue? My installation CD was only SP1.

 

[Heidfirst]

very possibly although I thought that XP Sp1 included LBA support (sounds like you are up against the 137Gb limit).
You should also check Maxtor's site for what they suggest about overcoming the 137Gb limit.

That chipset has basic native support for SATA drives, you would only need a floppy if you were going to RAID a couple of drives.