big hard drive's potential problem problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter FilterXG
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FilterXG

I am using an old Athlon 850 on a VIA KT133 chipset motherboard
running XP pro. I don't believe it supports 48-bit addressing but I
could be wrong. I want to buy one of the Western Digital Special
Edition drives (prob the 200GB but maybe the 250GB)... will I have
problems? I know the drives come with a controller card, which I am
hoping adds the support for the big drives.

If it does not I am perfectly willing to do multiple partitions. I
have heard conflicting reports that, no matter the size of the
partitions it will not work without bios/mboard support. Is this
true??
 
If your new WD drive comes with the controller card & cable (as a lot of the
packaged drives do) you must install the controller card in an available PCI
2.1 or 2.2 compliant (this is directly from the controller card instructions
I received with my new WD 200 GB drive) slot and use the supplied 80 wire/40
pin cable to connect the controller to the drive. I don't know what version
of PCI slots are available on this MB.

Be sure to follow the instructions exactly in the installation sequence for
the card and drivers as they differ if you are using the new drive as a
secondary (non-boot) drive or as a boot drive.

The WD drive I bought came with a fairly good "Quick Install" instruction
sheet, the controller card, the hard drive, two floppy disks (Driver disk
and Data Lifeguard Tools disk), 4 screws and 1 jumper.
 
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