Vista 32-bit only sees 128gb of large hard drive

[Snacko]

I use Vista Home Premium full install with 4 SATA hard drives. My data drive
is a WD 750-gig. Disk Management sees 698.64gb with no unallocated space.
It's an active partition on a basic disk. But when I open "computer" or an
explore page, it sees the smaller value.

I've found solutions for xp/2000 that involve enabling 48-bit LBA, but I
haven't seen anything on Vista. I don't recall being prompted for the SATA
drivers during the load (F6) but I can't promise anything because it's been
awhile.

Any ideas?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Both are correct. The 750GB value is based on a different calculation,
that's all.

A gigibye is 1,073,741,824 bytes (binary calculation translated to decimal)
but a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes (a straight base ten calculation). A
750 gigabyte drive is therefore 698 gigibytes. Manufacturer's, naturally,
like to list their hard drives in gigabytes because they sound bigger that
way. The system is going to give the binary calculation (gigi-) in decimal.

See the section on Capacity Measurements, last paragraph, in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Was the drive previously partitioned with a third party tool or a Windows
tool?

 

[Snacko]

I appreciate the info on how the OS calculates drive availability, but I knew
that part of it. This was a freshly formatted NTFS drive. I formatted it
after installing Vista Home Premium, then added the data drive. Now Vista is
behaving like XP with 48-bit LBA disabled. My first assumption has to be
that Vista also has this feature disabled, but I can't find documentation to
support that and I'd rather ask someone else before pulling out my machete
and heading into the jungles of the Vista registry.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

My question still is, was the drive partitioned (not formatted) with a third
party tool? Perhaps you were using it in another computer or on the current
one before installing Vista.

Most mobos now have SATA driver support in firmware so you probably wouldn't
need to provide a driver via the Load Driver button in Vista Setup (same
function as XP's F6).

 

[andy]

I use Vista Home Premium full install with 4 SATA hard drives. My data drive
is a WD 750-gig. Disk Management sees 698.64gb with no unallocated space.
It's an active partition on a basic disk. But when I open "computer" or an
explore page, it sees the smaller value.

I've found solutions for xp/2000 that involve enabling 48-bit LBA, but I
haven't seen anything on Vista. I don't recall being prompted for the SATA
drivers during the load (F6) but I can't promise anything because it's been
awhile.

Any ideas?

If Disk Management shows the drive capacity as 698GB, then Vista has
to be using 48-bit LBA to access the drive. Disk Management shows the
capacities of the partitions on the drives: what drive letter is
assigned to the partition on the 698GB drive, and what is the capacity
of that partition?

 

[Snacko]

Excellent question. The drive letter is G. Disk Management shows partition
capacity at around 700 Gb, but explorer only sees 128gb. One half of Windows
see all the disk, the other half of Windows sees only 128Gb.

 

[Andy]

What happens when you run chkdsk on G:?
And after that what does Disk Management show about partition G:?

 

[Snacko]

checkdisk shows no errors, then disk mgmt shows the same 698g available, but
windows explorer sees 128g. I'm thinking of formatting it again, but I want
to see if there's a windows fix or registry hack I can perform before I do,
because I expect the same result from formatting.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Don't just format. That won't change anything. Delete all partitions on
the drive and create one new one.

 

[Snacko]

Yeah, I did that. A complete format in Vista writes zeroes over the entire
mbr, which makes it a fresh disk (and unrecoverable using linus and other
recovery apps). Vista sees this disk as a fresh new drive. Disk mgmt sees
all the space, but windows doesn't. That's the barrier I am trying to break.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Formatting can write all the zeroes it wants, but it doesn't change the
partition table. Delete any partitions, create a new one, and then format
as you like. The key is to delete the problematic partition.

 

[Snacko]

Thanks. I will do that when I get time to move the data off it. This was to
be my next step, but I'm still concerned about what would make it a
problematic partition. There aren't any options other than right-click,
format (full or quick), etc. But this is Windows. Sigh.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The options are in disk management. There when you right click you get lots
of options.