Patition > 128 GB lost after XP reinstallation

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a pre-SP2 XP CD. My system disk was a Maxtor 120 GB and I had a
second data disk of 300 GB.

Yesterday, my 120 GB had been in trouble (several sectors lost) -
ntoskrnl.exe file corrupted.

I reinstalled XP on a third disk (on a 50 GB partition) + zillions of
Windows update (SP2...) and the successive setup have found nothing better
than creating a partition of 128 GB over my 300 GB data partition.

Is there any way to undo this rather unclever behaviour of XP setup ?

Thnks !

 

[Guest]

The issues behind this are complex. I had one machine where a 200GB partition
worked until it was half-full, then it over-wrote the FAT and trashed itself.

Basically, to use a disk (not partition, note) >137GB the BIOS, mobo disk
controller, IDE driver and OS all have to be 48-bit LBA compliant. If any of
these is not compliant it may not give any indication of such, but may lead
to a disaster.

The fact that the OS is not happy with creating large partitions suggests
one of these components is not compliant. I'd take that as a warning-sign
and check carefully.