Capacity max of a Hard drive

C

Carl St-Gelaos

Hi everyone,
I would like to know if there is a maximum capacity of a
drive in windows 2000.
I have install a 200Gb western digital in my compaq
win2000 and in the disk manager I see only 128Gb.
In the bion of the compaq it see 200GB

Thanks
Carl St-Gelais
(e-mail address removed)
 
J

Jisha

I believe the fix for that is also included in SP4.
My understanding is that even with the fix, there is still a registry edit
which has to be made for drives larger than 137gb.
Look around in microsoft.public.win2000.general for more...
 
D

DL

I am using large SATA disks was that the difference?, as I didnt undertake
any reg edit, to enable them.
David
 
L

Leonard Severt [MSFT]

I am using large SATA disks was that the difference?, as I didnt
undertake any reg edit, to enable them.
David

Leonard Severt said:
Its called 48 bit addressing and yes it has to be enabled in the
registry and supported by the hardware.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098

Leonard Severt

Windows 2000 Server Setup Team

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
 
D

DL

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

 
L

Leonard Severt [MSFT]

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.
 
D

DL

OK so I add the key but reading KB I'm not sure of exact procedure.
In regedit the Edit menu enables;
New:-
Add Key
String Value
Binary Value
DWord Value
and not Add Value as outlined in KB
David

 
D

DL

Well I've added the key now, booted OK
Anything else I should do to check my hd sys is ok now, it having been
formated prior to this tweak?
David

DL said:
OK so I add the key but reading KB I'm not sure of exact procedure.
In regedit the Edit menu enables;
New:-
Add Key
String Value
Binary Value
DWord Value
and not Add Value as outlined in KB
David
 
L

Leonard Severt [MSFT]

Well I've added the key now, booted OK
Anything else I should do to check my hd sys is ok now, it having been
formated prior to this tweak?
David

DL said:
OK so I add the key but reading KB I'm not sure of exact procedure.
In regedit the Edit menu enables;
New:-
Add Key
String Value
Binary Value
DWord Value
and not Add Value as outlined in KB
David

I don't know of anything else you need to do. I know that the one
experience I had with a 200 gig SATA drive worked fine after the key was
added to the registry. The partition had already been created in that
one and it worked fine.

Leonard Severt

Windows 2000 Server Setup Team
 
D

DL

Yes I had located it, I think my point at the time was that my large hd's
had formatted correctly without recourse to the 'biglba' reg edit
David

Jisha said:
Hi DL,

I looked around some more, to get you the reference on large drive support.

"To use a drive larger than 137 gb, you must enable support in the registry
by changing the EnableBigLba registry value to 1 in the following registry
subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters "

This is straight from KB305098
(
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098&Product=win2000 )
 
D

Dan Seur

Yoda - Try refreshing the BIOS drive setting using the BIOS "Drive
Detection" window (whatever it's called; it's different than the main
page default display.) Merely setting to LBA or "Large") may not
suffice. Make sure BIOS detects the full 200GB in that detection window.
If it does. save and exit BIOS.

If no joy from that, the motherboard may not be capable, or the BIOS may
need a flash update. In that case, check mboard manufacturer's website
for latest specs/fixes for that board.
 
Y

yoda174

I have a system running windows 2000. It has a Seagte 200GB EIDE ATA 10
hard drive. Only shows up as 137 GB, so I installed the SP4, and I mad
the registry edit. I also went into my BIOS and changed the Access mod
for my hard drive from auto to LBA. But after all of that, it stil
only reads as 137 GB... any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

yoda17
 

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