large drive support

[WAYNE]

I want to install a 160GB drive as a second slave drive
to store videos and pictures. What is the deal with
large drive support and what steps will I need to take to
install and format the drive?

 

[Jon_Hildrum]

WinXP with SP1 will support large drives (above 137 GB). Please see the
microsoft article below.
Your motherboard should also support 48 bit lba addressing or alternatively
you could use an add in controller card.


Here are a couple of links to Maxtor and WD where you can find more
information
WDC articles
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?p_cat_lvl1=81

Maxtor

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/...std_alp.php?p_sid=1Y5WrLWg&p_lva=&p_sp=&p_li=



Here is an Microsoft article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp

 

[Pete]

Me and a couple of others have had some problems with this so you may like
to take a look at this thread: "Hard disk reverts back to PIO mode" 26 Nov
2003. In the end I used a separate controller card. Good luck

Pete

 

[Guest]

Thanks Jon and Pete,

I put the drive in today no problem.

I did read those links Jon, thanks. I am running WinXP
SP1 and I updated my Atapi.sys to the latest version. I
also checked with Dell and they said my BIOS is 48 bit
LBA enabled. I needed to turn on Auto recognize in the
BIOS for slave device on the primary channel as it was
set to off.

I installed the drive and followed the instructions that
came with it. It's a Maxtor and I used the MaxBlast
software. Although when using the software there was an
option that was I believe called "express setup" which
would only set up the drive to use 137GB, I had to go
back and choose "Custom setup"

After installation I was all set, my drive worked, showed
full capacity and showed Ultra MDA mode 5.

The instructions said to run MaxBlast again from Windows
to install an EnableBigLBA patch to the registry as not
doing it the large drive support may not be fully enabled
and may lead to data loss. I did it just to be sure and
it looks like I am all set!