I checked my registry, there is no key, as per the kb article "to
enable 48-bit LBA....."
Since I have 2*150gb sata drive in a mirror raid setup, which appear
to be functioning correctly, to their full capacity, I'm wondering if
I should add this key?
David
Leonard Severt said:
There should be no difference with SATA since it is an extension of
ATAPI. I guess it is possible for 3rd party driver to do some type of
translation but I have never heard of that. If you check your
registry do you have the key? If you do and you didn't put it there
then a driver did it. Windows 2000 and XP must have that key to do 48
bit addressing to support drives larger than 127 gig. It is basic
math, with 31 bits and max sizes on heads and cylinders there are
only so many sectors possible.
Leonard Severt
Windows 2000 Server Setup Team
Here is one thing I have seen only 3 weeks ago. I had a customer that
had 200 gig SATA drive. He create one partition on it. Installed Windows
2000. He then started copying data and when he got around 115 gig of
data the system crashed and wouldn't boot. He next repartitioned the
drive with a 10 gig for OS and 180 gig for data. He installed and
started copying data again and once again the system crashed. Thats when
he called to Microsoft and had a case created and I worked with him. On
his OS drive the MFT was wiped out. We recreated that partition,
installed, updated to SP4 and made the registry key change. The data on
the second partition was fine. Customer continued to copy data until he
had 160 gig of data on the 2nd partition with no problems. Conclusion
from this; when copying data and he reached the 137 gig limit which is
really a limit of the head and cylinder drive numbers those numbers
wrapped around (reseting to low numbers) causing the data copy to
overwrite the MFT at the beginning of the drive. So my answer is yes
create the key and play it safe. Of course you can copy 137 gig of data
to your drive and see what happens.
Leonard Severt
Windows 2000 Server Setup team.