Enabling Large Disk Support

[Bill Anderson]

I've posted on this before, but now I've become desperate. I have a new
Western Digital 250 gigabyte drive that I'm trying to run on a WinXP SP1
system, Asus P4T-E mbo. Is anybody else out there running a large drive
on a P4T-E? So far I've been unsuccessful, so if you can do it, I'd
appreciate hearing how you made it work. When I tried to copy large
amounts of data to the drive this afternoon, I got up to the 137
gigabyte limit, and all files beyond that were reported as "corrupted."

Here's what I've done:

1) The Asus P4T-E motherboard is flashed to version 1005e. According to
documentation, that's supposed to make the mbo support drives larger
than 137 gigabytes -- 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA). And in
fact, the BIOS recognizes the drive size as 250 gigabytes, and indicates
LBA support. Everything *looks* good in the BIOS.

2) I'm running WinXP SP1. I've researched Microsoft Knowledge Base
Article 30313 and upgraded Atapi.sys to the correct version. I've used
X-Setup Pro to insure the registry contains the proper EnableBigLba
value, even though KBA 30313 says that isn't necessary with SP1.
Windows Explorer says the drive's capacity is 250,056,704,000 bytes (232
gigabytes). Yep, WinXP *says* I can access the full capacity of the
drive. I've re-formatted the drive, just to be sure. But when I get to
137 gigabytes, I begin to get error messages.

3) I'm running the latest version of Intel Application Accelerator.

4) Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools software will not run properly
on my computer. It always crashes in Windows. And that's too bad,
because this software is *supposed* to provide access the the drive's
full capacity.

5) Western Digital's Lifeguard Diagnostics software reports the capacity
of the physical drive is 137 gigabytes. It also reports the *logical*
size of the drive as 244.20 gigabytes. Now why is that?

I really thought reformatting the drive was going to fix things -- it
took close to 2 hours to reformat the thing. I figured that was about
250 gigabytes. But nope, that didn't do it. I'm still stuck at 137
gigabytes.

Please, somebody, I need help.

 

[notritenotteri]

There is an ASUS users group alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus which
has some pretty knowledgeable participants. You might get some help
there.

 

[Bill Anderson]

The problem turned out to be that I needed to re-install WinXP SP-1. I
have a triple-boot system, Win98, Win2K, WinXP, and it eventually
occurred to me I could try accessing the drive out of Win2K. Worked
like a charm -- I loaded it up with over 170 gigabytes and had no
problems at all. Then I rebooted into WinXP and it reported the files
on the drive were corrupted. So today I've clean-installed WinXP SP-1,
and it can use the 250 gigabyte drive just fine -- over 170 gigabytes,
anyway. Now what happened to my previous installation of SP-1 that made
it unable to use the big drive? I have no idea.

Bill Anderson

 

[Trent©]

The problem turned out to be that I needed to re-install WinXP SP-1. I
have a triple-boot system, Win98, Win2K, WinXP, and it eventually
occurred to me I could try accessing the drive out of Win2K. Worked
like a charm -- I loaded it up with over 170 gigabytes and had no
problems at all. Then I rebooted into WinXP and it reported the files
on the drive were corrupted. So today I've clean-installed WinXP SP-1,
and it can use the 250 gigabyte drive just fine -- over 170 gigabytes,
anyway. Now what happened to my previous installation of SP-1 that made
it unable to use the big drive? I have no idea.

Bill Anderson

What program did you initially use to format the new, big drive?


Have a nice week...

Trent

If the cheese isn't yours...its Nacho cheese, man!

 

[Bill Anderson]

What program did you initially use to format the new, big drive?

Initially I tried WinXP. Then I tried Western Digital's Data Lifeguard
Tools. Neither worked under WinXP, and neither was ever going to work, I
think, until I re-installed WinXP SP-1. Something I'd done had screwed
with WinXP. I guess I'll never know just what. At least I hope the
problem doesn't recur.