do i have to enable big lba?

[daryl]

i have an intel 845gebv motherboard w/ controller and a 200 GB seagate
drive. i am going to install win xp pro on a 20GB partition and the rest of
the drive will be one partition for data. i will be installing win xp sp1
and update with the sp2 disk. do i have to enable large lba or is it
already set to use drives larger than 137GB?

 

[SlowJet]

If the drive is recognized in the bios as a the brand name indicates (press
on the bios entry to search for disk drive on primary master.) then the only
limit is the Partition size.
20 GB with XP vanilla would be fine to get started but you couldn't see all
the remainder of the disk to create a >137 GB partition until you have XP
SP1 loaded.

Set the bios to auto and if that doesn't show the drive name-size then mess
with the user as 16, 63, 65xxx and LBA or large disk.
Turn off DOS - other or large, etc... whatever it takes to get the disk
name-size showing during boot up.
If you can't do that then you need a bios update.

I would only be concerned about the 163 GB second partition, think about
keeping those under 137 or even 128 GB so they don't conflict with some
goofy quirk in your bios. Besides, that's a lot of data to lose due to some
bad spot on the disk. That extra 163 GB would make 5 32 GB partitions and
with compression turned on that would be well over 200 GB of data. The extra
MFT's would manage small files better and defrag requirements would be
segregated. ETC, ETC backups, images, music, databases, ISO's, install
packs, drivers.


GL,

SJ

 

[Alex Nichol]

i have an intel 845gebv motherboard w/ controller and a 200 GB seagate
drive. i am going to install win xp pro on a 20GB partition and the rest of
the drive will be one partition for data. i will be installing win xp sp1
and update with the sp2 disk. do i have to enable large lba or is it
already set to use drives larger than 137GB?

Provided the drive is correctly detected in the BIOS, and on setup you
install SP2 (you do not need to install SP1 first - get the SP2 CD and
run it as first action) you should not need to do anything further; go
to Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk
Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive. R-click
in the Unallocated space and you should have the remaining space
available (there will be about 167 left, bearing in mind the 200 is
decimal billion, the partition sizes in 'binary' version GB)

 

[Neil]

But are you sure SP2 contains the fix for EnableBigLBA=1?
I did a clean install on a new 200g WD using XP 2002. I
created a 20g partition and a 40g partition. XP was
installed on the 20g partition. I then upgraded to SP2.
After the upgrade, I searched my registery for
EnableBigLBA and it wasn't in there. Western Digital's
Data Lifeguard made the entry for me. I formatted my 40g
partition but the remaining 100gs was broken up as 69g
freespace and 21g unallocated. Now how do I get this
storage area to contigous?

Thanks...Neil