P4Pe800-E Dlx SATA Raid0 and IDE problem. 31.49 gig limit.

[bandit40356]

Help...
Asus tech support is absolutely no help (a tech is never available and
they never return calls). I am wondering if someone can point me in
the right direction. First let me set the stage for the problem.

I have an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Mobo with 1004 Bios. I have 2 Seagate
80 Gig SATA hard drives set up as RAID 0 (Using the Promise RAID
controller). The drives are partitioned as C:\ with 15 gig (for the XP
Pro OS) and ~63 gigs for the D:\ driver set for data. Everything works
perfectly.

Now for the problem....
What I want to do is use my Western Digital 160Gig IDE drive as a
storage drive. I've connected it to the Pri_IDE1 connector. (I
added the WD drive after I setup the RAID controllers and installed the
OS). The problem is when I view the drive in the Disk Management
program in XP, it only shows the drive as 31.49GB. I have taken this
WD drive to another PC that's not set up as RAID and it shows the WD
drive as 160GB drive. The Bios in the Asus Mobo also shows the drive
as a 160GB drive.

I've checked the BIOS updates on the Asus web site and even with the
latest Bios (1006), nothing has been changed that would effect this
problem.

Can anyone help me with this problem? I've given up calling Asus
tech support.

 

[Clark Griswold]

Help...
Asus tech support is absolutely no help (a tech is never available and
they never return calls). I am wondering if someone can point me in
the right direction. First let me set the stage for the problem.

I have an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Mobo with 1004 Bios. I have 2 Seagate
80 Gig SATA hard drives set up as RAID 0 (Using the Promise RAID
controller). The drives are partitioned as C:\ with 15 gig (for the XP
Pro OS) and ~63 gigs for the D:\ driver set for data. Everything works
perfectly.

Now for the problem....
What I want to do is use my Western Digital 160Gig IDE drive as a
storage drive. I've connected it to the Pri_IDE1 connector. (I
added the WD drive after I setup the RAID controllers and installed the
OS). The problem is when I view the drive in the Disk Management
program in XP, it only shows the drive as 31.49GB. I have taken this
WD drive to another PC that's not set up as RAID and it shows the WD
drive as 160GB drive. The Bios in the Asus Mobo also shows the drive
as a 160GB drive.

I've checked the BIOS updates on the Asus web site and even with the
latest Bios (1006), nothing has been changed that would effect this
problem.

Can anyone help me with this problem? I've given up calling Asus
tech support.

Did you format that 160 GB drive with FAT 32 using WinXP's format command?

 

[bandit40356]

Actually the Raid drives, as well as the WD 160Gb drive, is NTFS. But
yes, both were formatted NTFS.

 

[Bob Horton]

Actually the Raid drives, as well as the WD 160Gb drive, is NTFS. But
yes, both were formatted NTFS.

Did you try to delete all the partitions on the IDE drive, create a new
partition and then reformat? It sounds like a portioning problem to me.

HTH

 

[Paul]

Actually the Raid drives, as well as the WD 160Gb drive, is NTFS. But
yes, both were formatted NTFS.

Large disk support on Asus motherboards (Southbridge interfaces) is
listed here. Motherboards introduced after Jan 2003 have 48 bit
addressing support, so those models do not need to be listed. Your
motherboard should be ready for large disks.

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/english/techref/48bithdd/index.aspx

The issues are discussed here. You do NOT need to buy a BIOS upgrade
from this site, as that appears to be the financial driver for this
site. (One poster here, got suckered into buying a BIOS, so now I
have to give that warning.) But you can use the site to identify
Microsoft KB articles, or to identify what Service Pack is required
to use a large disk. Using the KB article number, you can then do
some Google searches for more info.

http://www.48bitlba.com/issues.htm

Basically, installing at least SP1 should help a lot.

HTH,
Paul

 

[bandit40356]

Thanks Paul for the info. I have SP2 installed on my XP Pro. I have a
strange feeling that my problems is using my 2 SATA Raid0 drives along
with 1 IDE hard drive (non RAID).

I have an older WD 40Gb drive that I will try in place of the 160Gb
drive. At least that way I will be able to tell if it's a problem with
the drive size limit or a problem with how I have this hooked up.

I assume that it's technicially possible to have SATA RAID drives AND a
lone IDE hard drive on the same system?

Also, do you think it's possible that my problems might be caused by
the use of the Promise Fast Track controller being used instead of the
ICH5R controller???


Thanks again for all the help!!!

 

[Paul]

Thanks Paul for the info. I have SP2 installed on my XP Pro. I have a
strange feeling that my problems is using my 2 SATA Raid0 drives along
with 1 IDE hard drive (non RAID).

I have an older WD 40Gb drive that I will try in place of the 160Gb
drive. At least that way I will be able to tell if it's a problem with
the drive size limit or a problem with how I have this hooked up.

I assume that it's technicially possible to have SATA RAID drives AND a
lone IDE hard drive on the same system?

Also, do you think it's possible that my problems might be caused by
the use of the Promise Fast Track controller being used instead of the
ICH5R controller???


Thanks again for all the help!!!

You have a RAID array on the Promise controller. Two 80GB drives
that must be running in mirrored mode, as you report the total
size as 80GB. They would show as 160GB if they were striped.

Your 160GB IDE drive was added to the Intel Southbridge. There
should not be a problem having drives on both chips. People are
doing that every day. The only issue that people run into, is
sometimes the boot order gets screwed up - the Asus BIOS is not
as clever as it should be.

I think it is fortunate that you listed the exact size of the
limitation you found. At first I figured that number was popping
up, because of some modulo arithmetic, but when I Googled, I was
finding mention of "31.4" for other sized drives, too. Implying
your problem is not 160 - X = 31.4, but no matter what drive
you connect, the limit will still be 31.4GB.

One posting suggested the size problem was caused by some
confusion about geometry. I don't pretend to understand
exactly what problem this is. Instead, I'd ask you whether
you've been using any custom settings inside the BIOS. When
it comes to IDE, I tend to leave the BIOS set to "Auto". I
believe the only valid setting these days is "LBA", and when
set to "Auto", the BIOS is probably using LBA as its mode.
Your limit suggests to me that something is not right in how the
BIOS is treating the disk.

That same posting mentioned some software on this page.

http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

Apparently the GB32 program "Examines if a 32 GB problem
is present for a disk larger than 32 GB". You could try running
that program and see what it reports.

I don't really like working on disk problems, because there is
just too much to know

Actually, another evil thought came to mine. You have probably
accidently put the jumper on the drive in the "clip" position,
instead of in the "master" position. Maybe you mirror-imaged
the jumper block when you read it. Check the jumper(s) you've
installed on the drive carefully. Your problem could be
as simple as that. The "clip" jumper is used to artifically
limit the declared size of a disk, for use with motherboards
that could not handle the 32GB barrier.

Good luck,
Paul

 

[bandit40356]

Interesting test....

I couldn't find my 40Gig HD, so I had to use my older WD 20Gg. When I
attached it to the system (the same way as the WD 160Gb), the OS is now
seeing the 20Gb as 20Gb.

This tells me, as you suggested, that this is not a problem with the
physical connections, but a software (Bios, controller) limitation.

Now my task is to try to figure out where....

I've mainly been searching in the Asus newsgroups and tech articles for
an answer. I think I'll change my approach and start looking at the
Western Digital angle to the problem.

I'll be sure to post the results if I get this working correctly. So
others don't have to spend as much time as I have chasing this issue!!!

Thanks again!

 

[MrGrumpy]

If there was no large disk support a hd would show,formated, as no larger
than 137gb.
So its not a lack of large disk support.

 

[bandit40356]

Think I might have solved this. The problem (I think) is that the WD
drives have a obscure little program that's only on the floppie Data
lifeguard tools program. I noticed that the BIOS was now only
reporting the file size on the 160gb drive as 31.49gb. I did some
searching on the WD site and found that you need to use the floppie
version of the WD data lifeguard tools and select the Utilities and the
"Set Hard Drive Size" (This option is not on the CD version of
lifeguard tools). When I ran this I noticed that the Recommended Max
LBA/Sector size was set to 33820. I changed this field to blank and
rebooted into BIOS, now it's showing 160GB. WhenI get home tonight
I'll make sure this works on my RAID system. I'm not sure how this
changed since I used this exact drive on my PC and it's reported the
entire 160gb. Somewhere along the process of installing the RAID
drives, this WD drive got reset to this 33820 (31.49 gb) value.

I'll report tonight is this is fixed so other that come across this
post might be able to solve the probems fast than myself.

Thanks to all that posted!!!!