Topic: Windows and Hard Drives... (Read 3425 times)

Toasty0 · « **Reply #20 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 · « **Reply #21 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 · « **Reply #22 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 · « **Reply #23 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 · « **Reply #24 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 · « **Reply #25 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 · « **Reply #26 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 · « **Reply #27 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.

Julin Eurthyr · « **Reply #29 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...

Heavens_Eagle · « **Reply #31 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 · « **Reply #32 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 · « **Reply #33 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.

Kroma_BaSyl

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