Large drive formatting

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rick
  • Start date Start date
R

Rick

I just installed a Seagate Barracuda 7200.0 w/8 meg buffer
ATA100 (ST3160023A). Bios sees the drive at full capacity.
XP sees the drive at 149 Gig, I assume this is normal.
Right now it is set as a slave drive and I am booting from
my old drive. I want to replace the old drive with the
Barracuda.

I want to partition 10 gigs for the OS to boot from, and
have the rest as a large storage partition. Here's the
problem. If I format using the Seagate Diskwizard, the
large partition is not available to the OS. If I try to
access the partition XP says it is not formatted even
though I just did it with the Seagate software. If I tell
XP to go ahead and format, it says it cannot complete the
format, although it looks like it is formating for almost
2 hours. After it gets to 100% it says it cannot complete
the format.

I tried to format using the computer manage function, no
go. Took over 1 1/2 hours to format the drive (everything
looks OK while it is working) but when it was near the end
again it says that it cannot complete the format. I tried
a few more times and played with different partition sizes
and found that XP will format a partition at 48 gigs but
not 61. Somewhere in between is some sort of barrier.
Anyone know what the problem is?

Also, if I get this sorted out I'm hoping to do a fresh
install of XP on the Seagate. Will this work since SP1
isn't installed on the XP installation CD?

System is as follows;
ASUS P4T533 w/256 meg Samsung 4200 RDram
Currently booting from old 6 gig Maxtor using Maxtor 60
gig for storage (60 gig disconnected at the moment,
Seagate 160 installed)
1.44 generic floppy
Aopen 52X CD rom
Yamaha F1E burner
XP Home Version 2002 SP1 installed
Maxtor Big Drive Enabler installed
ATAPI.sys updated as per Microsoft recommendation
Intel Application Accellerator installed and updated

Thanks, Rick
 
Bob;
Thanks for the reply and the links. I investigated the 48
bit LBA issue before purchasing the 160 gig drive. Along
with service pack 1, I used Maxtor's Big Drive Enabler
program to set the registry, made sure the current Intel
application accellerator was installed and searched the
Microsoft Knowledge Base for all I the information I could
find on 48 bit LBA.

I have checked the registry using the link you provided
and EnableBigLBA is set to 1 and the string reads exactly
as described in the link.

I searched for the atapi.sys file, however, as mentioned
in the Microsoft article you linked me to and found that
the folder (%systemroot%\system32\drivers) mentioned in
the article does not appear to exist. The article implies
that the folder should have been created when SP1 was
installed.

What's really confusing to me is that in computer
management the drive is seen as 149 gig, but will not
format beyond approximately 127 gig. If the format program
thinks it is a 137 gig would it display the formatted
space as 127 gig or 137 gig? I really think something in
XP still is being limited by the 137 gig barrier, gut I
have not been able to figure out what or why. I think the
Atapi.sys file may (I hope) be the answer.

Comments are most appreciated, thanks, Rick
 
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