200GB Partition Size

[jarledge]

I am installing a 200GB hard drive on a PC that has XP SP2, the PC's
BIOS also recongizes drives up to 250GB. My questions is
Should I use the full 200 in one partition or have 2 smaller
partitions? I perfer to have one large partition.
I heard that some Microsoft XP utilities do not recongize drives over
128GBs. Is this so? If yes, what utilities? Will I have performance
issues with one 200GB partition? Any recommendations?
Thanks for any help.

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Since you have SP2, provided your motherboard supports 48-bit, you should be
able to see the whole drive and if you want, have a single partition. I
have 3 x 200gb drives on my PC, one is partitioned into two, the others are
both single partition as I keep My Documents (including Videos, Music etc)
on one and the other is for My Recorded TV (I run a Windows Media Center)
and need big partitions. I have not had any performance issues.

 

[Patti MacLeod]

Hi jarledge,

Pre-SP1 XP does not support 48-bit LBA, required to recognize drive capacity
above 137G. This won't be an issue for you since you have SP2.

If you want to have one large partition, you would have to format it NTFS if
you are using XP's Disk Management utilities, as XP's utilities cannot
format a FAT32 partition that is greater than 32G. Another option would be
to use a WIN98 startup disk, with updated FDISK, to create and format a
greater-than-32G FAT32 partition.



Regards,

 

[Jon_Hildrum]

Your choice - It depends on what you intend to use the disk for.

I have one disk I use for video with a 250G partition. I find that for my
purpose a large partition is much better for me to deal with than smaller
ones. Furthermore, items like defrag does not take any longer on the larger
partition on an ongoing basis (the first time it may)

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am installing a 200GB hard drive on a PC that has XP SP2, the PC's
BIOS also recongizes drives up to 250GB. My questions is
Should I use the full 200 in one partition or have 2 smaller
partitions? I perfer to have one large partition.

If you are installing it as second drive, you can make it a single
partition. But set it up from inside XP: Control Panel - Admin Tools -
Computer Management, select Disk Management and look lower right for the
graphic of the drive. R-click in Unallocated space, Create Partition.
Personally I would split it, but that is your choice

 

[Guest]

I am having a similar problem with my laptop only recognizing 137Gb of a 160
Gb external one partition drive. I am running XP Home SP2 but am not
completely sure how to check to see if my BIOS will support 48bit. It's last
year's top of the line Sony laptop so I would imagine that it should. I
formatted in NTFS but having access to Win98 disks could reformat in FAT32.
Would that help me at all or am I barking up the wrong tree?