160 gb hard drive only shows 2gb

J

jeff

my current 40 gb hard drive failed on me, so i am trying to
install a new 160 gb WD hard drive with ultra100 ata card
on my soyo ps4 dragon ultra machine. but when i boot to the
windows xp cd, and try to partition and format for loading
windows, it only shows 2gb of space. is there a way to fix
this?
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Hey Jeff,

Are you sure the motherboard/bios supports it?

To access a 160GB disk, you need to be able to use 48bit addressing, older
motherboards only use 28bit which gives a max of 137GB. This is acttually
128 real gigabytes or 128*1024*1024*1024 bytes. Those sneaky disk
manufaturers use 1000000000bytes in a gigabyte. This is why disks always
show up smaller in the os than the label thats stuck on them.

28bits gives 2^28 = 128 gb Obviously 2^48 is huge.

Some older boards can be converted to 48bit addressing by upgrading the
bios, some can't. Check the manufacturers website for a relevant bios update
if this next bit doesn't show the right size.

First go into the bios, the first option off the main menu is normally for
the primary and secondary ide channels, make sure the detection is set to
auto, and the addressing is set to LBA.

I take it you have connected the disk to the primary or secondary ide
channel, and not to a raid channel if the board has one.
Reboot and in the second black and white bios startup screen, above the irq
table, you normally get a llist of ide devices, their size, and the speed of
the ide interface.
What do YOU get here? Hit the key labelled pause/break at the far right/top
row of keyboard to freeze the screen.
CTRL-Q to unfreeze.

You need sp1 to fully address the whole 160GB(149 real GB), but I would
expect it to see 128GB if the bios is OK

Paul
 
M

Mike Powers

The add in card should have done it but he may also need a software
driver to see the whole drive. Follow the instructions you got with the
card and drive very explicitly. Did the card and drive come as a set?
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Yeah ,

It was a pretty dumb question, I thought better of it, about a nano second
after I hit.send.

Paul
 
D

David Gaguine

I can't see a motherboard listed for a ps4 dragon ultra - if you mean a
SY-P4S dragon ultra then the soyo website indicates that this board supports
200GB HDD and has Four independent channels for 8 IDE devices (2 for IDE
RAID) & Ultra DMA 66/100/133, so I don't understand why you need an addon
ata card anyway. I would suggest download the latest bios and use the
on-board ata controller and latest drivers. As a start when you boot up, go
into the BIOS and see what capacity HDD is noted, if it is listed as 160GB
your problem is not with the motherboardboard/BIOS
 
G

Guest

-----Original Message-----
my current 40 gb hard drive failed on me, so i am trying to
install a new 160 gb WD hard drive with ultra100 ata card
on my soyo ps4 dragon ultra machine. but when i boot to the
windows xp cd, and try to partition and format for loading
windows, it only shows 2gb of space. is there a way to fix
this?
.
 

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