Problems installing big hard drive

[Neal Rosen]

I am trying to install a 160 gig WD eide drive in my PC
with a 1.8Ghz P4 Intel D850MV board. I have already
upgraded the bios and the atapi.sys for 48 bit addressing
and isstalled the controller card that came with the drive.

The next step should eb to format the drive. However,
Windows explorer shows the unformatted drive as having
only 127 gigs.

What more must I do to make the system see the full drive
capacity?

 

[rob]

Sadly, that is the true storage capacity of your new hard
drive. The drive marketers measure a megabyte as
1,000,000 bytes, but computers measure a megabyte as
1,048,576, therefore a drive advertised as a 160Gig
(160,000 megabytes) is actually roughly 127gigs. This
link explains it better:

http://eies.njit.edu/~walsh/powers/mungedabyte.html

 

[Pete Baker]

Rob

Perhaps you should invest in a calculator before attempting to advise anyone
else on this issue.

Drive manufacturers do indeed use the decimal version of a Gigabyte,
1,000,000,000 bytes, but an OS will measure it as 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes =
1,073,741,824 bytes.

That means the OP should see a drive capacity in drive properties of roughly
149Gb.
Even using your calculation you would get 152Gb, not 127Gb.


Neal, the only step you seem to be missing is to install Service Pack 1.

Hope that helps
Pete
-----------------------------

 

[Pete Baker]

Neal

Have you installed XP Service Pack 1?

Check through the information and steps needed to let XP see the full
drive here

How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives
in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

Hope that helps
Pete

 

[neal rosen]

Thank you for the response. But, are you sure that the
math works out? It would seem to me that I should be
getting around 148 - 152 gigs of real space on a 160 gig
drive, not just 127 gigs. And yes, I did install SP1.

I am wondering if the drive is reading so low a capacity
because Windows or the Motherboard is still not seeing the
entire drive.

 

[LVTravel]

Here's a really stupid question. Did you plug the new drive into the new
controller card or into the motherboard's controller? If you plugged it
into the MB, put it on the add-in card as the Primary Master/single (jumper
setting).

As you did not specify where you plugged in the drive, this would be one
solution.

If you plugged in the drive to the new controller card, you will have to
repartition the drive in Windows XP. Click on Start, Settings, Control
Panel, double click on Administrative Tools, double click on Computer
Management. Click on Disk Management. Find your new drive in the list to
the right. Right click on the drive and choose delete partition if
available. After the computer has deleted the partition, right click again
and click on Initialize drive.

You must format to NTFS and not FAT 32 as Win XP can't format a drive above
32 MB as FAT 32.

 

[neal rosen]

You were kind enough to provide me with some help already
on this matter, so I hope you will consent to give me just
a bit more help. The drive shows up in the device manager
as a SCSI device (I think because it sees the controller
that way). I assume that means it sees the controller
card. The drive is definitely connected to the card, not
the motherboard. It also, after installing the Intel
application accelerator, still shows 127 gig instead of
the 150 gigs or so that I assume a 160 gig hard drive
should show as available. Also, in following your
instructions, I do not see a list on the right after
opening the Administration management in the control panel
and I certainly do not see the drive listed. I only see
the drive only if I go into the device manager. I don't
see any option to delete any partition. Do you have any
other suggestions? Thank you for your help. If you
can't help me I will pretty much be forced to take it in
to a shop for $50-$100 for them to fix the problem.
Please reply to all senders so I can get the answer at
home as well as in the office. Neal.

 

[Pete Baker]

Neal

My apologies for jumping back into this thread, but you seem to be having
trouble finding the required disk management utility.

Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage".
Disk management is listed under Storage on the left.
After clicking on 'Disk Management' you should be able to see the drive in
the right hand side panel.

Check the disk there and whether you need to delete the existing partition
or initialize first.

If you want further details then there is info on installing a disk using
disk management here - you may already have completed some of the steps but
it does include some assistance and images to guide you.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

Although it is on the Seagate site the instructions should work for any
drive.

Hope that helps
Pete

 

[Pete Baker]

No problem LV.

Neal seems to be temporarily AWOL from this thread but hopefully he will
update on his progress.

Cheers
Pete