"Ray said:
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I tried it with both XP SP1 and W2K
SP4. Unless I'm missing something there must be more to it than that. The
funny thing is that Intel says it will work if I use their Accelerator
application for Windows. However, they also say that the application is
only compatible with their older chipsets. Now there's a switch, their new
chipsets can't support big drives but their older ones could. Go figure!
A point you might be missing, is that, for a given chipset, the drivers
are provided by the manufacturer of the chipset. So, whether your
motherboard is made by Asus, Gigabyte, or Abit, they will all be shipping
the same Intel chipset installer to you. Swapping motherboards won't
fix anything, if they all have an 865PE/ICH5R on them.
Granted, different motherboards will have different peripherals on them.
So, if one board had a Via RAID, and another had a Promise RAID chip,
then sure, swapping boards would get you a different RAID chip with a
different set of issues. The Via drivers will be written by Via, and the
Promise drivers by Promise, so again, the manufacturer of the board
doesn't matter, in terms of driver quality.
As for IAA, there are two entirely different versions. Intel would
have been smart to come up with another marketing name, so it is
their loss. IAA, as far as I know, was written back when bus mastering
was introduced. The Microsoft OS at the time, knew nothing about
the DMA transfer of disk data, and the inherently higher performance it
offers. To support the feature until the OS situation improved, Intel
wrote a driver, to be used to get bus mastering to work. That became
the Intel Application Accelerator, a driver for a vanilla IDE interface
that allowed bus mastering to work.
Much time has passed since it was introduced. Now, we have Microsoft
OSes that have bus master support built in, meaning the default driver
is every bit as good as IAA from Intel. So, on the one hand, Intel can
afford to stop supporting IAA, as the market for it is effective zero.
The second thing that happened, is Intel has added RAID to the
Southbridge. No Microsoft OS knows about such a beast (in hardware),
so Intel wrote IAAR for the ICH5R Southbridge and WinXP OS. If not
doing RAID, the ports in question can still be used for stand alone
disk drives, so all Microsoft OSes can get some use from those ports.
(That is where the "Enhanced" and "Compatible" settings for the ports
come into play, in the BIOS. Your choice between the two settings,
is determined by which OS you plan on using.)
In terms of the Intel drivers, whether IAA/IAAR, you should be using
the latest one you can find, as earlier versions didn't properly
support 48bit addressing. In this case, I don't see a need for
either driver, as you are going to be using this disk as a vanilla
drive.
In terms of support, here is the official position of Asus:
http://www.asus.it/support/english/techref/48bithdd/index.aspx
"Model manufactured after 1st January, 2003 will all support
48bit HDD (137 GB HDD)."
Manufacturers that use the same chips as Asus, will end up with
the same level of compatibility (they all rely on the same
BIOS providers, like Award or AMI).
I wish I could offer you a simple recipe, guaranteed to get the
job done - perhaps there are better news groups for that than
this one. I would recommend a WinXP install disk that already
has SP1 built into it, as if you are trying to install the OS
on a large disk, that would be the way to go. If the big disk
is being used as a data only disk, then you could install SP1
on the boot disk first, then add the big disk and go from there.
If you don't have a WinXP+SP1 install disk, you can make your
own with an original WinXP disk and a process called
"slipstreaming". These are some links I was given when the
topic came up before (thanks, Tim).
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/38619/38619.html (slipstream)
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8892 (adding drivers?)
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=XP+slipstream+SP1+Drivers
Microsoft's answer is here, now more easy to understand after
it was rewritten:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
This thread seems to suggest you can install the OS on the big
disk, if the OS is kept below 137GB. Maybe slipstreaming SP1
or using a WinXP+SP1 install disk removes that limit.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=BACC5DFF.208F6%[email protected]
Before putting live data on the disk, try copying large test files
until you get past the 137GB mark. If 48bit support isn't working
properly, the file system will be corrupted instantly when passing
that mark. That is due to the modulo rollover of the disk address,
and the resultant writing near the beginning of the disk, when your
request meant to write at a 137+ GB location.
My contribution in this post, is to not give up on the motherboard
you've got - the problems won't get easier by changing motherboards.
If you want to "dodge the bullet", swap the drive for some smaller
ones
Paul
