Maximum hard drive size

[Edward Diener]

I installed two 160 GB hard drives and finally moved my Win2k partitions to it
successfully. I have not noticed a direct Win2k problem but under Win2k my
latest 3rd party partition manager ( Paragon Partition Manager Professional 7.0
), and my previous 3rd party partition manager ( Powerquest Partition Magic 7.0
) both seem unable to move an extended partition, which contains no Win2k used
logical partitions, to the end of my hard drive. This leads me to believe there
is some limitation in Win2k for hard drive size.

The hard drive I bought, a Samsung 160 GB drive, had software for setting 48 LBA
in the Windows registry, which supposedly enabled Win2k to deal with a hard
drive of this size. The software merely says it sets 48 bit LBA but does not say
what registry entry is changed. I executed this early on but it makes no
difference as far as my 3rd party partition managers are concerned. Maybe this
should not have been set, but it was suggested on the Samsung sight that it
needed to be for their 160 GB drive.

Does anybody know about any issue with Win2k and hard drive size ? Is there a
setting which needed to be set in the registry for 48 bit LBA, as Samsung
supposedly did in this program ? Any help would be appreciated since I do not
want to lost some 60 GB on each of my hard drives. I have put in a customer
support request to Paragon software so maybe they know something, but I wanted
to see if anybody here new something also.

 

[DL]

I believe you'll find the problem using third party PM's is overcome in the
later versions
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098 for details
of Big Lba

In order to enable Big Lba from the outset of an installation it is
neccessary to,
a) have a bios that supports large hd's
b) use either a version of win2k that includes Big Lba, or use a
slipstreamed version of win2k, that includes it.

If you install win2k, without LBA enabled, you will have approx 137gb, after
you enable Big Lba, you can create a partion in the 'spare' space.
Be aware there is a theoretical chance of the file sys being corrupted if
you enable Big Lba after an install, in order to use the 'new' space

 

[Edward Diener]

I believe you'll find the problem using third party PM's is overcome in the
later versions
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098 for details
of Big Lba

In order to enable Big Lba from the outset of an installation it is
neccessary to,
a) have a bios that supports large hd's
b) use either a version of win2k that includes Big Lba, or use a
slipstreamed version of win2k, that includes it.

If you install win2k, without LBA enabled, you will have approx 137gb, after
you enable Big Lba, you can create a partion in the 'spare' space.
Be aware there is a theoretical chance of the file sys being corrupted if
you enable Big Lba after an install, in order to use the 'new' space

Thanks, I did susbsequently find that link when I searched the Internet. Since I
am on Win2k SP4, as long as I have hardware support for 48 bit LBA and turn on
48 bit LBA in the registry, I should be fine.