Topic: Windows and Hard Drives...  (Read 3424 times)

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TOCXOBearslayer

  • Guest
Windows and Hard Drives...
« on: February 14, 2004, 08:24:41 am »
How do you get Windows to recognize that the F-ing HD is 160 Gigs?

Tried the fix from the manufacturer of the HD, no go.  

Updated WindowXP, no go....

One suggestion is to format it as a 30 gig HD and hope that it will recognize the other 130 gigs after that....


Suggestions?

Pestalence

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2004, 08:30:58 am »
Have you got the HDD's latest drivers? have you updated your Mother Board's Driver set? if not and you are running Intel CPU, to to Intel.com and get the Chipset Update utility then check yout HDD manufacturer's web site and get the latest drivers for it.

see if this works.
 

Dash Jones

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2004, 08:52:40 am »
Was it formatted before or after you installed XP.

If you allow XP to format it, it should recognize the harddrive space, and format accordingly.  Don't know why it wouldn't...unless it was formatted before XP, in which case I'm not certain what the correct course of action would be, as the others don't recognize such a big drive.  

There is a fix for Win9x (at least Win98SE and WinMe, but I can't recall it off the top of my head...perhaps someone would provide a link...I'm too lazy right now to look it up).

IF and AFTER neither works, I would suggest as a last resort, partition the drive (I don't really care for partitioning, but I know others do...

Toasty0

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #3 on: February 14, 2004, 09:00:11 am »
If you have an older MoBo (though it should not run XP if it's that old) you might have to set the bios to recognise the bigger HDD.

Best,
Jerry  

TOCXOBearslayer

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #4 on: February 14, 2004, 09:17:28 am »
Here are the specs:

P4 3.06 ghz processor
Intel 865GBF mobo (pretty new has 800 FSB and other bells and whistles) with the latest BIOS flashed onto it.  
1 gig of PC3700 DDR RAM
80 Gig Maxtor HD (fine and showing ~80 gigs)
160 Gig Maztor HD (not formated, but when windows 'locates it' and asks to format, it gives me an option to format it to a size of 31.4 GB)

The last time I used the 'Maxtor' drivers to format the thing, it loaded up via boot process and asked which HD to format.... I told it the 'D:\' drive (the 160 GB one) but it formatted BOTH hard drives.

Needless to say, I wasn't too happy over that one.
And not too trusting of their drivers anymore.....
 

Toasty0

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #5 on: February 14, 2004, 10:45:20 am »
Do what I do, Bear. Take out the primary, format the new drive using DOS promts, then hook the primary back in.

Don't forget to set the new drive to master and back to slave.

Best,
Jerry  

NCC1476

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #6 on: February 14, 2004, 10:54:00 am »
If windows can "see" any part of your 160 gig hard drive then that is a good thing.  And since you are using
win XP that to is good. Try the following to see if you can get the whole capacity formated.

Right click on "my computer" (or whatever you call it)
Click on "manage".
Under the storage section click on "disk management"
If your 160 gig drive is listed and it shows free space and you want the drive partition to be one large
drive right click on that drive and delete the partition.
Then all you need to do is create a new partition and then format it.  Right click on the drive and select create partition.
A wizard should come up to help with this.

If you want to make a few smaller partitions then click on the free space and right click to create a new partition
and then format those to what ever size you want.  Again a wizard should come up.

Hope this helps.  

Dash Jones

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #7 on: February 14, 2004, 02:41:56 pm »
Quote:

Do what I do, Bear. Take out the primary, format the new drive using DOS promts, then hook the primary back in.

Don't forget to set the new drive to master and back to slave.

Best,
Jerry  




Ah, I wasn't aware there was another drive there.  Perhaps as Toasty suggests...see what happens if only one drive is connected...make it the 160 Gig one...

Not much experience on it recognizing if there are two drives in...except for external drives, and networking computers...but that's an entirely different matter.

E_Look

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #8 on: February 14, 2004, 03:38:12 pm »
I'm not sure, but I thought I saw, not so long ago when I was looking for the SP1 upgrade on Microsoft's site, a fix for HDs larger than 137 Gb.  I'd recommend rummaging through MS's site and see if they do indeed have a fix for the big HD problem.

Or, you could spend about $50 USD for a controller card that allows big HDs.  (Personal preference: I'd look for a driver update before I spent any cash...)

MrCue

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2004, 02:20:57 pm »
You need to enable a setting to use HDD's above 137gb. I ran into when i bought my 250gb drive. When i purchased my 300gb, it reckognised it straight away.

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

I think thats the page i used.

E_Look

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #10 on: February 16, 2004, 11:40:35 pm »
Boy, here I am an old DOS dog and I still can't find my way around these GUI thingies on our machines these days.

I just built a system not even a month ago (the one I'm using right now!) and I decided to go with only one big drive, so I got a SATA 120 Gb one.  "I'm smart!", thought I, going with 120 Gb, which is just under 137 Gb, the Line of Demarcation for the newest forms of Windows, so I don't have to worry about their inability to recognize drives over 137 Gb.  Well, it turns out that SATA drives are controlled via separate chips on the mobo, so it wasn't even problem!  (Rats!  I could have gone after a bigger HD!)

"Well," says I, "I'm still smart, for SATA is FAST!"... except bonehead here enables the OTHER SATA controller and my bootup and POST phase was always rough!  I didn't figure out until THIS morning that I had to go into BIOS and disable the other SATA controllers, as the BIOS was looking for it and sometimes, this caused the system to hang either during or right after POST.

My upshot from this Shaggy's Scoopy Doo Doo story for TOCXOBearslayer?  Well, Cueball has a point- plumb the BIOS menus and see if there is a quick and easy way to enable the extra Gb to be seen without spending more money.  Again, also check MS's site.  I could've sworn there was some d/l there that was supposed to help with this exact problem.  If I can find the gumption, I'll poke in there again and see if I can stumble across it again.

Kroma_BaSyl

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #11 on: February 17, 2004, 10:23:36 am »
Quote:

I'm not sure, but I thought I saw, not so long ago when I was looking for the SP1 upgrade on Microsoft's site, a fix for HDs larger than 137 Gb.  I'd recommend rummaging through MS's site and see if they do indeed have a fix for the big HD problem.

Or, you could spend about $50 USD for a controller card that allows big HDs.  (Personal preference: I'd look for a driver update before I spent any cash...)  




Actually, this is about right. I just went through this last week. If you verison of XP doesn't have SP1 as psrt of it's build you can't get over 137GB in the primary partition and can only recover the missing space after updating to SP1. The dirve will probably come with a utility to allow you to recover the extra space as a separate partition with it's own logical drive (The 200GB Seagate I had did anyways). Some thing like Partition Magic might allow you to append the primary partition after updating to SP1, but I never tried this.  I was lucky enough to be able to get a corp copy of XP w/ SP1 already in the CD build, which was able to see all 200GB in the partition stage of windows setup. Without the XP build with SP1 it is kind of a chicken and egg thing. I searched the MS site high and low with no luck finding anything that would let me get it all on the primary partition, before talking to the guys in the office. I was able to use my own Key to install XP even with their burn of the OS disk, which was cool.

Julin Eurthyr

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #12 on: February 17, 2004, 03:41:34 pm »
Check the jumpers on the drive...

I just had to do the inverse.  80gb Maxtor drive on older (1999) BIOS that couldn't go that high, capable of going to about 30gb.  There was a Capacity Limiter jumper that I had to engage.  Once that was on, the Maxtor drivers added a "dynamic drive overlay" system that enabled me to access the rest of the drive, but you had to let the overlay load in the boot process before engaging any boot CDs to load the OS...

Letting the BIOS boot system pull from the CD / Floppy led to confusion (80 gb format on a BIOS-reported 30gb drive...

Kroma_BaSyl

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #13 on: February 17, 2004, 03:46:59 pm »
Quote:

Check the jumpers on the drive...

I just had to do the inverse.  80gb Maxtor drive on older (1999) BIOS that couldn't go that high, capable of going to about 30gb.  There was a Capacity Limiter jumper that I had to engage.  Once that was on, the Maxtor drivers added a "dynamic drive overlay" system that enabled me to access the rest of the drive, but you had to let the overlay load in the boot process before engaging any boot CDs to load the OS...

Letting the BIOS boot system pull from the CD / Floppy led to confusion (80 gb format on a BIOS-reported 30gb drive...  




The 137GB limit is XP without SP1 though. If he is seeing 137GB the jumpers or BIOS is probably already set to LBA. But you should double check that just in case.

If you can get you hands on a CD with the XP SP1 build though, it should solve your issue.

Heavens_Eagle

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #14 on: February 24, 2004, 09:53:54 pm »
Early last year I had a similar problem.  Seems that the hardware could see and tell that I had 2 160gig drives, but the problems was in Win XP.  It seemed to load and all, but no dice.  

Seems that Win XP has a size limitation of somewhere around 127gig or so for a partition .  Since I did a raid 0 setup with the 2 160gig drives, I ended up with a 320 gig drive.  Partitioned it into three 100 gig drives.  Runs like a champ.  Loads XP fully in about 45 seconds from cold start.    

Rota

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #15 on: February 25, 2004, 01:56:12 am »
Are you running an NTFS format? Fat  32 will not handle the larger drive. Just a thought.  

Heavens_Eagle

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #16 on: February 25, 2004, 10:51:42 pm »
My drives are NTFS.  The NTFS has partition size limitations too.  That is why I had to do three 100 gig partitions.  

TOCXOBearslayer

  • Guest
Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #17 on: February 14, 2004, 08:24:41 am »
How do you get Windows to recognize that the F-ing HD is 160 Gigs?

Tried the fix from the manufacturer of the HD, no go.  

Updated WindowXP, no go....

One suggestion is to format it as a 30 gig HD and hope that it will recognize the other 130 gigs after that....


Suggestions?

Pestalence

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #18 on: February 14, 2004, 08:30:58 am »
Have you got the HDD's latest drivers? have you updated your Mother Board's Driver set? if not and you are running Intel CPU, to to Intel.com and get the Chipset Update utility then check yout HDD manufacturer's web site and get the latest drivers for it.

see if this works.
 

Dash Jones

  • Guest
Re: Windows and Hard Drives...
« Reply #19 on: February 14, 2004, 08:52:40 am »
Was it formatted before or after you installed XP.

If you allow XP to format it, it should recognize the harddrive space, and format accordingly.  Don't know why it wouldn't...unless it was formatted before XP, in which case I'm not certain what the correct course of action would be, as the others don't recognize such a big drive.  

There is a fix for Win9x (at least Win98SE and WinMe, but I can't recall it off the top of my head...perhaps someone would provide a link...I'm too lazy right now to look it up).

IF and AFTER neither works, I would suggest as a last resort, partition the drive (I don't really care for partitioning, but I know others do...