Hard drive not showing full capacity

[Guest]

Setup: WinXP Pro SP2 - Promise Ultra100TX2 - Maxtor 300GB EIDE HD - Momboard
ATA is saturated, Promise card is in PCI slot, with Maxtor drive only.

How come I cannot get this drive to format / partition anything greater than
127GB?
- It's not LBA support
- It's not Promise PCI card BIOS (btw at boot, the card shows the full
capacity)

 

[DL]

You've update the Ultra bios to enable large lba?
http://www.promise.com/support/download/download2_eng.asp?productID=11&category=all&os=100

 

[DL]

PS Just realised you said its not Promis Bios, however it can only be either
mobo/Promise Bios or win Big Lba

 

[Guest]

Yes, see second bullet. Latest BIOS is on card, and confirmed in boot window.

 

[Jim Lewandowski]

What tool are you using to format/partition? Disk Management in XP (Admin tools)?

JL

 

[Anna]

Setup: WinXP Pro SP2 - Promise Ultra100TX2 - Maxtor 300GB EIDE HD -
Momboard
ATA is saturated, Promise card is in PCI slot, with Maxtor drive only.

How come I cannot get this drive to format / partition anything greater
than
127GB?
- It's not LBA support
- It's not Promise PCI card BIOS (btw at boot, the card shows the full
capacity)

Kraemer:
I assume you've attempted to partition/format your 300 GB HD in Disk
Management, right? And DM just indicates the 127 GB capacity, yes?

I realize you've stated the BIOS recognizes the full capacity of the drive
while it's connected to the Promise controller card, but notwithstanding
that, if you connect the drive to a connector on either of the IDE channels,
does the same situation (problem) exist?
Anna

 

[Jim Lewandowski]

Is EnableBigLBA set to DWORD=1 by DEFAULT (whether SP1 or SP2)?

When I was running Seagate's DiscWizard, during new drive setup it said something about
having to reboot because a given OS setting wasn't appropriate. My only guess is that
EnableBigLBA wasn't 1.

JL

 

[Bob Knowlden]

A guess:

Have you installed updated drivers for the Promise card? The ones included
with XP may be too old. See:

http://www.promise.com/support/download/download2_eng.asp?productId=11&category=bios&os=100&go=GO#

The note on the BIOS version 2.20.0.14 (added LBA48 support) states that
driver version 2.00.0.29 or later is required with a 137 GB or larger drive.

I hope that's your problem, as you appear to have eliminated most of the
other possibilities.

I can't personally verify the necessity of this. I ran an Ultra100TX2 under
XP, but the largest drive I used with it was 80 GB.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Guest]

Yes, I am using Disk Management, under Admin tools. I can do this like
change from/to basic disk/dynamic disk, assign drive letter, etc. Everything
seems to work just fine, but I cannot get past 127GB...

 

[Guest]

Hi Anna, haven't tried that, could be ugly...

Kraemer:
I assume you've attempted to partition/format your 300 GB HD in Disk
Management, right? And DM just indicates the 127 GB capacity, yes?

I realize you've stated the BIOS recognizes the full capacity of the drive
while it's connected to the Promise controller card, but notwithstanding
that, if you connect the drive to a connector on either of the IDE channels,
does the same situation (problem) exist?
Anna

 

[Anna]

Hi Anna, haven't tried that, could be ugly...

Kraemer:
And why, pray tell, would it be "ugly"? Simple enough to do, no? And if, by
so doing, the full capacity of the drive was thereby detected by the system,
well, that would tell you a great deal, wouldn't it?
Anna

 

[David Vair]

Did you use maxblast on it, sometimes the drive overlays can screw things up. Also check your
jumpers on the drive. I also use a Promise card and have had no issues with large drives.

 

[Guest]

I have tried to use MaxBlast on it, but MaxBlast will not run with BootMagic
installed. I tried to remove bootmagic, but it do not go cleanly. Now the
Promise card complains that Bootmagic.img can't be found. System still boots
okay, same problem with disk, MaxBlast still thinks Bootmagic is installed.

Anyone heard of conflicts with Bootmagic? Is there an easy way to get
windows to overwrite/repair the MBR on the boot disk?

TIA,
Kraemer

 

[Guest]

This might have been the problem. I updated the driver, and now it is
formatting and showing 279GB. That does seem a little low for an advertised
300GB drive, but I'll take it...

Thanks for the help.
Kraemer