Hi again all, and thanks for your replies to date,
I have taken some time to look into exactly what has happened to my
drive (full details of the symptoms of the problem can be found in my
earlier post).
I have not managed to recover much of my data, but have found out a
number of facts which might be useful to others. These were the facts
that I could not find on the net earlier, and inadvertantly led me to
erroneously conclude my system supported the full disk size.
What I have discovered:
To use a hard drive past the 137/128 GB limit (depending on your
definition of a GB) in Windows, the system must be configured to meet
the following requirements (taken from the MS Knowledge Base):
1. A computer with a 48-bit LBA-compatible Basic Input/Output System
(BIOS) installed.
2. A computer with a hard disk that has a capacity of greater than
137 gigabytes (GB).
3. A computer running either Windows 2000 SP3, or Windows XP SP1.
4. You must enable the support in the Windows registry by adding or
changing the EnableBigLba registry value to 1 in the following
registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
Note that step 4 is a manual step, and does NOT occur automatically
when 2000SP3 is installed. Enabling 48-bit LBA support (i.e. setting
the registry key value) in Windows 2000 has to be done manually.
On the other hand, installing XPSP1 does automatically enable 48-bit
LBA support.
My system meets requirements 2, 3 and 4, but not 1.
I find it surprising that the Maxtor Disk Setup Utility (which is
supposed to determine whether the MaxBlast3 DDO Overlap is required)
did not try to install the overlay, nor did it mention that my system
does not support 48-bit LBA. Nor does the documentation (which I did
read thoroughly) mention the exact four requirements I have listed
above (though the setup utility does set the registry key). Unless I
am missing something, this seems a very poor piece of software.
From these articles and the help I have received through other peoples
posts, I think I am now in a better position to understand what may
have happened:
1. The drive (Primary Slave) was fine after the XP install had been
completed into the second partition on Primary Master.
2. When Win2000 didn't boot and I ran the win2k repair, it replaced
the XP loader with the 2k one. I didn't boot into XP immediately and
so didn't notice this straight away.
3. I was in 2000 and copied some data into Primary Slave which went
past the 128GB barrier, and seems to have now got put on top of part
of the MFT.
4. I then attempted to go into the XP install, which gave the strange
2000 boot up message, now explained by (2).
5. I then went back into 2000, and the Primary Slave was now broken.
Hence my confusion around the failed XP boot attempt causing the
problem.
While it is nice to now better understand why this probably happened,
unfortunately I am now closer to retrieving my data. I have run a
couple of scans of the drive using the R-Studio recovery program, and
depressingly few real files have turned up. There are a lot of
fragmented/hoax entries.
Svend, if you are reading this, it seems I might not be able to get
Windows to see the entire disk afterall, as per your suggestion.
Though, given what I have described above, it seems unlikely that
there might be any data there anyway?
I am not sure of the best way to proceed. Does anyone have any ideas?
It seems that I might have to resort to trying to retrieve the data
without the MFT structures?
For others who may be reading this in the future, the following
articles / websites that I have used (and that I found useful) are:
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 305098
48-Bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;305098
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303013
How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk
drives in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;303013
No doubt Microsoft will change their knowledge base links again in the
future, but hopefully a quick search on the Article Ids should find
them.
The following may also be useful:
48bitLBA.com - Source for 48-bit LBA Information
http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm
Bios & Windows OS Limitations for ATA Hard Drives
http://www.buildorbuy.org/bioslimits.html
(48bitLBA.com also has a useful little utility on called HDInfo, to
get some status information about your disks, plus whether your system
supports 48-bit LBA or not. It isn't free unfortunately, but costs
only around GBP5).
Thanks for taking the time to read all this!
Chris