Only 128Gb of a 160Gb disk

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nico
  • Start date Start date
N

Nico

Hi,

I installed 2 extra disks in my machine, one 80Gb and one 160Gb, both maxtor
IDE drives connected to the primary IDE channel.
There is already a SCSI disk installed on which runs W2K sp2.
Disk manager sees the 160Gb disk as 128Gb although the BIOS detects the disk
well and reports it as being a 163xxxMb size disk.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,
Nico
 
(e-mail address removed) says... while attaching C4 explosives to computer and
foaming at the mouth!
Hi,

I installed 2 extra disks in my machine, one 80Gb and one 160Gb, both maxtor
IDE drives connected to the primary IDE channel.
There is already a SCSI disk installed on which runs W2K sp2.
Disk manager sees the 160Gb disk as 128Gb although the BIOS detects the disk
well and reports it as being a 163xxxMb size disk.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,
Nico
Click to expand...

Found this on a webpage (too lazy to type my own words) Bottom line is,
I believe SP3 supports LBA above 128gig......Sp2, 128 & below....While
the BIOS sees it as okay the OS won't....Ya may need to update.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
On entering windows the new device was detected and a system restart
initiated. Imagine my surprise after that reboot the disk sat
unpartitioned in my management panel but was only detected as 128Gb in
size. I will admit this on problem took more than a few hours to solve.
The problem is that although I had installed Service Pack 3 which
supported drives larger than 128Gig it DOES NOT enable that support by
default. In order to do so the following must be entered into the
registry, (Nb. Service pack 3 for win2k and Service Pack 1 for XP MUST
be installed)

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters]
"EnableBigLba"=dword:00000001

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Nico said:
Hi,

I installed 2 extra disks in my machine, one 80Gb and one 160Gb, both
maxtor IDE drives connected to the primary IDE channel.
There is already a SCSI disk installed on which runs W2K sp2.
Disk manager sees the 160Gb disk as 128Gb although the BIOS detects
the disk well and reports it as being a 163xxxMb size disk.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,
Nico
Click to expand...

Depends on your version of Windows (which means you need to get the
latest service pack), your BIOS, and your IDE controller. The driver
for your hard drive, the BIOS, or the IDE controller itself is not
supporting beyond 28-bit addressing, so you max out at 2^28 sectors *
512 bytes/sector = 137,438,953,472 bytes = 128 GB (where 1 GB = 2^30
bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes). Something in your system is limiting
addressing to 28 bits.

You must have the following:
- BIOS that supports 48-bit addressing mode.
- Your IDE controller's driver must support 48-bit addressing mode.
This can be updated with a driver for the vendor of your IDE controller
card or may be included in the latest service pack for Windows.

Since your BIOS appears to be recognizing the drive as a 160 GB drive
this mean it is okay and the IDE controller also supports 48-bit mode in
its hardware. So you need to get a driver that support 48-bit mode. If
you have a Promise controller card, download their latest driver. If
your IDE controller is on the motherboard, you will need to contact your
motherboard vendor or the chipset maker to get a 48-bit driver. It may
be that your IDE controller is supported by Windows and you are using
the driver that came with Windows; in this case, you will need to
upgrade to the latest service pack of Windows.

Some old controller only supported up to 24-bit addressing, so your max
partition was only 8 GB. Then newer ones came along that support 28-bit
addressing so your partitions could get up 128 GB. To get past 128 GB,
your IDE controller must physically support more than 28-bit addressing
mode (i.e., 48-bit addressing).

You got yourself bigger drives. Now it is time to get the drivers
and/or hardware to support them.


See:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
 
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