Trouble - How to handle 180GB harddrive ?

Ralf · Post by **Ralf** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 11:45 pm

i have build a pc for a friend with 3 Ghz, new mainboard (SATA support, up to 4 GB) and a 160 GB harddisk as slave (data harddisk, not system)!

The BIOS accept the 160 GB harddrive! But when i try to format the the 160 GB drive, Windows2000 will only be able to handle the harddrive up to 120 GB ;-( Even there seems to be no way to split the big 160 gb drive into two parts ;-(

someone an idea how to solve this problem? many thanxx

Max.Â² · Post by **Max.Â²** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 11:51 pm

Have a look here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... bContent=1

In short:

Install the latest SP (#4) and add to the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters

EnableBigLba = 1 (DWORD)

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 8:06 am

please note, there are a few boundaries, depending on mainboard on controller!!!!

120 gb limit (often imposed by bios, os should bypass it)

160 gb limit (can be due to controller issues, you may have to limit to 160 gb or use another controller, if i recall correctly it was the lba48 barrier, but my memory may cheat on me there)

make sure you test a setup with drives over 160 gb, and test it well! (create a partition in the first 10 gb, then one of the remainder minus 10 gb, then at the end of the disk another partition of 10 gb, and do some read / write tests)

i ran into one case with 200 gb hdd's where the drive got screwed up once the area above 160 gb was being used

the built in tool of win2k has some limitations, these days i prepare my drives with partition magic before installing any os... no more limits

NoahPhense · Post by **NoahPhense** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 7:54 am

I'm running a 250gb hdd on my 2k server box.. I have it split in half. But for a while I had it as one partition.

And this is on a PII

Whats making it work perfectly is the BIOS software that came with the drive..its not for the system bios.. its for the header of the drive..

- np

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:12 pm

I had to partition my drive into a 120 gig and a 40 gig partition in order for XP to play nice..

plouf · Post by **plouf** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:21 pm

in a recent 120gb hd problem i had with a maxtor hdd

i need to a) use its own tool (bootablew cd coming with harddisk) to partition/foramt disk DO NOT FORMAT IT with windows ,cause it intalls a boot stuff loaded in bootup in mbr and do its tricks in bios
and b) install SP4 + all updates to win2000server

there is a 139gb limit i think to win2000 stantear