winxp/i440bx: 30 gb hdd shows up as a 2 gb drive!

  • Thread starter Thread starter martin kinkelin
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martin kinkelin

hey guys,

i have just installed a 30 gb hard drive in my old computer (asus p2b with
intel 440bx, bios v1012 (latest stable), p2 350, 128 megs sdr-sdram...) in
addition to the old 8 gb drive and the cd-drives. i instantly entered the
bios setup to detect the new drive (where it says about 30,000 mb, i.e. the
correct value). but when i started the winxp setup from cd, it detected only
a 2 gb drive instead of the 30 gigs one. well, i deleted the existing
partition (must have been a 30 gb one), created the new 2 gb one and
formatted it with ntfs. now, 1 day after the windows installation + sp1 +
rollup package 1 etc., and after having installed partition magic v8.01 too,
it still does not detect the whole capacity, a fact which quite sucks. i do
not understand how this can happen, as my bios detects the drive correctly,
and winxp is supposed to be supporting largest drives, at least since sp1
has been released, and even the unpatched fresh winxp should allow me to use
a maximum of 127 gigs of a drive.
any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

/martin kinkelin

ps: the drive is the master of the first ide channel and there should be no
hardware conflicts whatsoever.
 
Since the PC is afairly old, you may be running into a BIOS limitation.
Just because the BIOS can see the disk does not mean that the BIOS can use
all the disk. Check the motherboard manual (or the detailed PC manual,
usually on CD, not on paper), or contact the motherboard or PC maker. As I
recall there are at least two limits very near 8 Gig, then the next ones are
about 32 Gig, then around 127 Gig. XP itself (even pre-SP-1) can handle up
to the 127 Gig limit, so XP is not likely the problem.

Note that there were some tricky things done by disk makers about half a
decade ago to make PCs handle what was then large disks (i.e., greater than
2 Gig, the old FAT16 limit). Some of those tricks may not work under XP.

You might want to try wiping the disk of all partitions, then accessing it
with some DOS-based parititioning tools like FDISK or the friendlier tools
provided by the major disk makers, and make the whole disk FAT32. Assuming
that the tools see all 30 Gig, then reboot with a plain DOS floppy (win98 or
ME) and see if that can see all 30 Gig. If either of these steps fails,
think about getting a PCI adapter card with an ATA/100 controller on it and
attach the disk to it. The controller will have its own BIOS, with a limit
of 127 Gig (or higher). It will also be faster than the controller on your
motherboard, whihc is likely ATA/33. Once you fix the size problem, feel
free to reformat as NTFS, since that is the preferred choice for XP.
 
The Asus P2B definitely will accept your hard drive (you might want to
install 1014 beta 2, at this stage of the game, Asus will probably never
have another update for your motherboard given its age)

You may want to double check your jumper settings to make sure that you've
jumpered the hard drive properly. Some hard drives have a capacity limit
jumper configuration that is used to ensure compatibility with older hard
drive controllers that don't support the full amount of a large hard drive.
The 2 gig limit sounds like what you could be encountering.
 
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