Win2K-Sp4 sees internal WD 160GB hard drive as 131GB

[mafat]

Gurus,

My PC configuration is:
CPU 466Mz celeron
160MB RAM
Win2K Pro Sp4
WD 160GB HDD

Recently bought WD 160GB internal hard drive. Win2K-Sp4 sees internal WD 160GB hard drive as 131GB. How to make Win2K see WD 160GB full capacity?

Thanks a bunch.

 

[nanaki333]

did you try updating your bios? also, take a look at disk management, the rest might be unallocated.

 

[mafat]

Its an old PC brand name: Myfavorite PC. Company doesnot exist any more. So no support for BIOS upgrade.

 

[nanaki333]

you'd be surprised what you can google for these days. see if you have the manuals that tell you the board model, or look on the board itself for it.

 

[mafat]

Thanks nanaki333.

Will check the board.

Will also look at disk management. If I see the unallocated chunk, how do I allocate that to existing partition? Would I have to format that chunk?

 

[nanaki333]

yeah, if it's a large chunk you should be able to format it.

 

[Harvey]

I know it is unlikely, but if you formatted the drive as FAT32, instead of NTFS, you'll need an updated version of FDISK to exceed 132 GB.

 

[huesmann]

Maybe you could also try Partition Magic?

 

[EeyoreX]

Try this?
Does the BIOS see the entire 160GB drive? If not you either need a BIOS update (as was suggested) or a PCI controller card that supports 48-bit LBA (around $20) that will recognize the correct capacity. Before we can really help, we need to know where the problem is, though my sugguestions address both (as do others before me). Let us know if the problem is really Windows or if it is the hardware.

\Dan

 

[mafat]

Gurus,

I greatly appreciate all the help from you.

I checked on the BIOS and mainboard of my PC.

The BIOS is by Award Software International, Inc. version 6.00 PG date 08/11/1999. I checked their website and they directed me to the manufatcturer of the mainboard.

The mainboard is made by First International Computers Inc, model CW33, version 1.x. I checked their website for BIOS update, but none of the versions (VB415, VB414, VB412, VB410) seems to address this issue.

The BIOS doesnot see 160 GB.

Is it possible to partition the hard disk into 100GB and 60GB NTFS partitions using the operating system Win2k pro Sp4 CD? If yes, how can I do this?

 

[huesmann]

I believe your hardware needs to be able to see the whole drive for you to partition it.

 

[EeyoreX]

I believe your hardware needs to be able to see the whole drive for you to partition it.

That is correct. if the BIOS does not see the drive as being 160GB (or 149.01GB) than you will not be able to partition past the 131GB your computer recognizes. The only way (outside of a new motherboard) around this is as I suggested earlier, a PCI IDE controller, commonly available for $20 that supports 48-bit LBA. You will be albe to boot and otherwise use the drive the same way, only with the entire capacity.

\Dan

 

[mafat]

Gurus,

I tried installing the Western Digital Data Lifeguared tool, but that din't work. They had mentioned that it creates an overlay so that the full capacity can be detected.

Then as EeyoreX suggested the microsoft article link, I made the change in the registry (though, I thought SP4 would have already taken care of this, as this was for SP3).

The registry update helped to detect 149GB (still short of 7GB, as 160GB in binary is approx 156GB). This is definitely better than detecting 131GB!!!. For now I think I will just go with this, but, in future as suggested, I might go for the PCI IDE controller card that supports 48-bit LBA.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[Unforgiven]

you can get a promise tx2 pci ata 133 card for cheap. i highly recommend them if you decide to go that route in the future.

 

[wseyller]

you are dealing with the 137gb limit. The bios, chipset, interface, and the operating system must be able to handle 48-bit sector addresses and drive parameters.

Is your motherboard at least using Ultra ATA/100. If not then your out of luck

 

[wseyller]

I guess I should read the previous post. Yes get a controller card that supports 48-bit LBA.

 

[Ryoga]

Another option is to try using overlay software supplied by Western Digital. Specifically, the Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO that is part of their Data Lifeguard Tools. Note that you must be using Win2k SP3 or later or WinXP SP1 or later.

Link:
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

 

[Steve]

Actually, you've got what you can get. Every 160GB drive I've seen has come out to 149 in full. You always lose about 7%, hence 120GB drives will give you 111GB, and 160GB drives will give you 149.

 

[Ryoga]

Originally posted by: sm8000
Actually, you've got what you can get. Every 160GB drive I've seen has come out to 149 in full. You always lose about 7%, hence 120GB drives will give you 111GB, and 160GB drives will give you 149.

Er, no. Your talking about the difference between GB and GiB.

HDD manufacturers state that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. So a drive that's advertized as 160 GB is 160,000,000,000 bytes. Windows, on the other hand, uses 1 GB = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes -- which is more accurately called 1 GiB (a giga-binary-byte or gibibyte).

160,000,000,000 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes per GiB = 149.01 GiB


It's also why you alternately see people discussing the "137 GB barrier" and the "128 GB barrier" or whatever.

We have 28-bit addressing of 512 byte standard sectors. 2^28 * 512 = 137,438,953,472 bytes maximum addressable HD size. So there's 137 GB, or:

2^28 * 512 bytes / 2^30 bytes per GiB = 512 / 4 = 128 GiB

We're dealing with the physically addressable locations, so with the overhead of partition tables and boot records, the cap is often known as the 127 GB barrier because you'll never see one at 128 GB.

So why can this guy see 131 GB? Seems kinda random, huh? That I'm not sure about, but I suspect there a BIOS issue to blame, or that Windows is confused by the BIOS's lack of support.

For reference 48-bit LBA mode also has a cap. But at 2^48 * 512 bytes, it's a cap of 128 PiB... 128 peta-binary-bytes.

 

[wseyller]

He should lose about 11 or 12 gb from the advertised space, but not 29GB. He probably has an ATA66 bus.

 

[Steve]

Originally posted by: mafat
The registry update helped to detect 149GB.

 

[Steve]

Originally posted by: wseyller
He should lose about 11 or 12 gb from the advertised space, but not 29GB. He probably has an ATA66 bus.

Why would transfer speed limit drive capacity?

 

[wseyller]

ATA is actually a specification and there many modes that developed over time.

Some were ATA-1, ATA-2, ATA-3 through ATA-7 which is the same as Ultra ATA/133.

The ANSI T13 committe and other companies worked together release the ATA-6 (Ultra ATA/100) specification adding 48-bit addressing scheme to extend the maximum capacity of the ATA interface to 144 petabytes. Because of that it required a completely new interface, chipset, updated firmware, and OS being able to support 48-bit sector addresses.

Also something about interupt 13h I remember that was used by the bios could figure out all the addresses to every cylinder, track, and sector on the drive. When the drives got bigger there wasn't enough room from all of the addresses. Interupt 13h had used 28-bit number.

I know that the bios uses this interupt to determine the disk size and partition information when using utilities like fdisk.

Hope this helps

 

[Steve]

I see. Good info, thanks!

Are we agreed though, that he's got 149GB and that's all he's gonna get?

 

[wseyller]

Looks right to me.