Gigabyte GA-8i848PG and big hard drives!

[Christopher Povey]

Originally I had a Gigabyte GA-8SG667 motherboard with a 30Gig hard drive running Windows XP Pro.

I then bought a 200GB Western Digital IDE drive. I used PowerQuest’s Drive Image 7 to copy the 30GB drive to the 200GB drive. I then
removed the 30GB drive and ran on the 200GB drive and all was well. Then about a month later the above motherboard went pop! I then
bought a Gigabyte GA-8i848PG motherboard. Due to this board’s chipset being different from the original I had to format and reinstall Windows
from scratch, which I attempted as follows:

1) Installed the 200GB drive on its own as the primary master. The BIOS sees it as a 200GB drive and is using Large as the access
mode with the settings Cyc= 65536, Heads = 16, Sectors = 255.

2) I put the Windows XP SP2 disc in my DVD drive and booted off it and then partitioned the drive as 190GB NTFS "C:" and
10GB FAT-32 "D:" (The FAT-32 is for Linux sharing as it trashes NTFS partitions!). Windows XP will be on the 190GB partition.

3) Windows XP started to install on the drive and then rebooted the PC. It then produced an error along the lines of "Cannot load operating system"

4) Downloaded Western Digital Lifeguard software and partitioned the drive with it. Attempted 3 again and got the same results.

5) Put the original Seagate 30GB drive in as the primary master and set the 200GB drive as primary slave.

6) Successfully installed Windows XP on to the 30GB drive.

7) Ran the Western Digital Lifeguard software which tweaked the registery. Partitioned and formatted the 200GB drive as in 2) above.
Except now 190GB is D: and 10GB is E:

I am getting no corruption of the 10GB partition data which is, by definition, past the 137GB limit.

So why cannot I not install Windows XP on the 200GB drive when it is the primary master? The BIOS and Windows XP obviously support it.

I did ask originally if this could be a Windows XP installer issue. I could by pass this by imaging the 30GB drive "C:", the 190GB "D:" and
the 10GB "E:" on to sets of DVD+RW discs, then remove the 30GB drive and blank and partition the 200GB drive as 30GB "C:",
160GB "D:" and 10GB "E:" and restore each set. Note: each partition is only fractionally used at the moment so i would probably reduce
the 30GB parition a bit. Would that work?

I really want Windows to soley use the 200GB drive a) because its faster than the 30GB drive and b) I want the option of putting Linux on it own
drive, or using the 30GB soley as a backup drive.

Please help.....

Chris.

 

[Andy]

Originally I had a Gigabyte GA-8SG667 motherboard with a 30Gig hard drive running Windows XP Pro.

I then bought a 200GB Western Digital IDE drive. I used PowerQuest’s Drive Image 7 to copy the 30GB drive to the 200GB drive. I then
removed the 30GB drive and ran on the 200GB drive and all was well. Then about a month later the above motherboard went pop! I then
bought a Gigabyte GA-8i848PG motherboard. Due to this board’s chipset being different from the original I had to format and reinstall Windows
from scratch, which I attempted as follows:

1) Installed the 200GB drive on its own as the primary master. The BIOS sees it as a 200GB drive and is using Large as the access
mode with the settings Cyc= 65536, Heads = 16, Sectors = 255.

You should set the BIOS to AUTO detect and AUTO set mode the IDE
drives. That way, the BIOS should set the drive to LBA mode.