Large Disk on an Asus P4T-E Mbo

[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. 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.

 

[Carl Farrington]

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. 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.

Is the drive warranted? Since you're not bothered about the data you might
look at getting it changed for another brand. Perhaps check
storagereview.com for info about that particular drive and if other people
have had the same problem.

 

[Bill Anderson]

Is the drive warranted? Since you're not bothered about the data you might
look at getting it changed for another brand. Perhaps check
storagereview.com for info about that particular drive and if other people
have had the same problem.

Thanks, Carl, but I've given up on getting the drive to work on my
current syustem. I did see a promise of improvement when I flashed the
BIOS to 1008e beta. I actually got more than 137 gigabytes of files
onto the drive, but then it began reporting errors and when I rebooted
WinXP ran chkdsk and ran and ran and ran chkdsk and ran it some more
until it reported an "unexplained" or "unexpected" error, I forget what
it said. Bottom line -- I just quit and put my old 120 gigabyte drive
back in the system. I'll use it until I build a new computer around a
more current motherboard. Thanks for your suggestions, though!

 

[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

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

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.

Probably something in the registry that affects driver behaviour
and that got skrewed-up by some unfortunate chain of events
making the driver behave differently for reading and writing.

 

[BitMe]

Yeah Me too the same problem

Hey Ho,
I just purchased 250 GB Hard drive for my P4T-E motherboard and surprisingly the system sees only 137 GB. (Win XP SP0. ATA 100). Where did you get the BIOS update? My bios recognize the hardrive but do not see the full capacity?
What these settings do:
normal, lba, large, manual.?
Is xp sp2 update enough to avoid updating bios?
Thanks ,