New Maxtor 300gig read as 4.35 gig

[lifeconstruct]

I just replaced a dead 120 gig drive with a 300 gig Maxtor pata drive
in slave. The bios reads it fine as "maxtor 300 gig" but when I format
in windows it only shows up as a wimpy 4.35 gig drive. Anyone have any
solutions?

 

[lifeconstruct]

BTw its on XP sp2, ntfc

 

[John McGaw]

I just replaced a dead 120 gig drive with a 300 gig Maxtor pata drive
in slave. The bios reads it fine as "maxtor 300 gig" but when I format
in windows it only shows up as a wimpy 4.35 gig drive. Anyone have any
solutions?

So, do you have 48-bit LBA turned on? You need it with that large a
drive so that seems to be the best first guess from here.

 

[John Smith]

I'm sure you've done this but : open control panel,Admin tools, computer
management, storage, disk manaagement. What does the disk look like
there?
Do you maybe need to partition it?

John

 

[DaveW]

You did NOT give any information about your motherboard, but it's probably
the case that your motherboard is older and it's BIOS cannot recognize any
size of harddrive larger than 137 GB. You need to buy another 120 GB drive.

 

[John McGaw]

You did NOT give any information about your motherboard, but it's probably
the case that your motherboard is older and it's BIOS cannot recognize any
size of harddrive larger than 137 GB. You need to buy another 120 GB drive.

No, probably not. He did write that the BIOS recognized the drive as
300gB. That means that it is hardware compatible anyway and that should
mean the a simple registry change should enable addressing the full drive.

Things can get really really weird when putting in a large drive on some
systems and I've been bitten myself when a large drive _seemed_ to be
properly recognized but in actuality the data was being scattered around
the drive and overwriting existing data randomly. Took me a LONG time to
recover from that one...

 

[Robert Heiling]

No, probably not. He did write that the BIOS recognized the drive as
300gB. That means that it is hardware compatible anyway and that should
mean the a simple registry change should enable addressing the full drive.

Things can get really really weird when putting in a large drive on some
systems and I've been bitten myself when a large drive _seemed_ to be
properly recognized but in actuality the data was being scattered around
the drive and overwriting existing data randomly. Took me a LONG time to
recover from that one...

I think you're right about that and I had to modify the registry on my
Win2000 to accept a greater than 137GB HD. He's running XP, but SP? I
vaguely recall that SP2 has the support, but SP1 needs the registry mod.
I also have XP (SP2) here and there's no problem with 250GB. He needs to
Google for the details.

Bob

 

[John McGaw]

I think you're right about that and I had to modify the registry on my
Win2000 to accept a greater than 137GB HD. He's running XP, but SP? I
vaguely recall that SP2 has the support, but SP1 needs the registry mod.
I also have XP (SP2) here and there's no problem with 250GB. He needs to
Google for the details.

Bob

That's how I recall it. Actually most manufacturers offer a small
downloadable "large drive" utility which makes the modification to keep
users from making a mistake and leaving themselves with an unbootable
system.

 

[lifeconstruct]

Thank John McGaw!!!!

I forgot all about 48bit lba, I read about it but never had to put it
to use. I searched Maxtors knowledge base and found the utility
(maxBlast4) that fixed the reg and set up the drives for me.

Alls fixed and Im now backing up to the new drive.

btw John, I checked out your site, its fun. I looked through the pics
and will read your storys after I get some sleep.

Thanks again guys.