Only 137 of 300 GB recognized by XP SP2

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Guest

I recently had to replace a hard drive in my system due to mechanical
failure. Prior to the failure I had the following configuration:

Asus P4B533E motherboard with BIOS 1009
WD Hard Drives: 100 GB, 120 GB, 180 GB
Promise ATA100 Controller Card (that connected all three HDs)

The defective drive was the 120 GB drive (partitioned 30 GB for System and
90 GB for Data).

Note that the 180 GB is greater than the 137 GB 48-bit LBA limitation. This
tells me that I had a > 137 GB drive running and fully recognized by Win XP,
which in turn means that my MB, my HD controller card, and Win XP SP2 all
supported 48-bit LBA prior to my purchasing a replacement drive.

NOTE: SP2 was installed on my machine (several months ago) after all three
hard drives were successfully working under SP1.

So today I purchased a WD 300 GB replacement hard drive. I connected it (and
only it) to the controller card. I booted from a Win XP CD (which is
preloaded with SP2). Win XP said I only had 137 GB. So I partitioned 30 GB
for the C drive, and left remaining space unpartitioned. I then installed Win
XP. After installation, I verified SP2 was installed.

My problem is that Disk Management in Control Panel is telling me that I
only have 100 GB unpartitioned space, whereas I should have 270 GB.

Where's the rest? Isn't SP2 supposed to support 48-bit LBA by default?

At first I thought it was my BIOS. So I upgraded to the latest non-beta
version, BIOS 1014. I repeated the entire Win XP install process. No change.

It can't be the controller card because on bootup it tells me that a 279GB
(i.e. 300GB) hard drive is connected to IDE port 1.

Am I missing something?

Please help !!
 
Hi, Dennis

Thanks for the reply.

I already tried to add the EnableLargeLba key (as the KB article states) to
the registry with no behavioral change. I shouldn't have to anyway since SP2
should have this enabled by default.

What is MaxBlast? Never heard of it? How can it help me.
 
oh. I'm sorry Maxblast is for Maxtor HD.
Did WD HD install CD have similar software for formatting HDD > 137 gig?
 
Problem solved !!

I went to Western Digital's website. Noticed they had a download for a
Promise ATA100 TX2 controller card. I didn't think that applied to me since I
don't think I have a TX2 version. However it installed the driver OK and upon
reboot, XP was telling my that my unpartitioned space was now 250 GB (i.e.
the remainder of the non-partitioned space.) Halleluja.
 
Good. Wonder why 180 gig works okay or does it?
Oh well ain't broke don't mess with it right!!!

Good you fix it!! Controller driver issue.
 
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