XP SP2 EnablebigLBA=1 Hard Drive Parition > 137g

[Neil]

Hello all,

I am another lucky XP Pro user with another hard drive >
137g problem.

I bought a Western Digital 160g EIDE hard drive and
proceeded to do a new installtion of XP. When I first set
up a partition on the drive, formatted NTFS, my BIOS could
not see the whole 160g. Researched the problem and found
out I need to upgrade BIOS, which I did. Bios now reports
160g primary master. Tried to delete new NTFS parition
but was forced to format FAT32 over it. Used old Fdisk to
remove all partitions. Reboot. When the drive was bare
again, created new 20g and 40g partition. Formatted and
installed XP on 20g partition. Installtion went well.
Tried to download SP1 to get support for hard drive >
137g. XP SP1 is no longer available. Microsoft claims
that all SP1 fixes are in SP2 and I do not need SP1.

Installed SP2 and XP lists the drive as 149.05g not the
160g it really is. Remaining 90g (should be 100g) is
listed in disk manager as 69.40 freespace and 21.06
unallocated. I have not been able to combine the
freespace and unallocated.
EnablebigLBA was not in registery after SP 2 install. I
got Western Digital Data Lifegaurd to add Enablebiglba = 1.
Drive is still reported as above.
I want to create one drive with the remaining room; should
be 100g.

Can't?

Please tell me if SP2 indeed includes enablebiglba. Is my
drive stable? How to create a 100g partition using the
all of the remaining room. Why is XP only reporting the
drive as 149.05g instead of the 160g the BIOS reports?

To really fix the problem, I am willing, if need be, to
wipe the drive again spend another night reinstalling
everything.
Thanks..

Neil

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I am another lucky XP Pro user with another hard drive >
137g problem.

I bought a Western Digital 160g EIDE hard drive and
proceeded to do a new installtion of XP. When I first set
up a partition on the drive, formatted NTFS, my BIOS could
not see the whole 160g. Researched the problem and found
out I need to upgrade BIOS, which I did. Bios now reports
160g primary master. Tried to delete new NTFS parition
but was forced to format FAT32 over it. Used old Fdisk to
remove all partitions. Reboot. When the drive was bare
again, created new 20g and 40g partition. Formatted and
installed XP on 20g partition. Installtion went well.
Tried to download SP1 to get support for hard drive >
137g. XP SP1 is no longer available. Microsoft claims
that all SP1 fixes are in SP2 and I do not need SP1.

Installed SP2 and XP lists the drive as 149.05g not the
160g it really is. Remaining 90g (should be 100g) is
listed in disk manager as 69.40 freespace and 21.06
unallocated. I have not been able to combine the
freespace and unallocated.
EnablebigLBA was not in registery after SP 2 install. I
got Western Digital Data Lifegaurd to add Enablebiglba = 1.
Drive is still reported as above.
I want to create one drive with the remaining room; should
be 100g.

Can't?

Please tell me if SP2 indeed includes enablebiglba. Is my
drive stable? How to create a 100g partition using the
all of the remaining room. Why is XP only reporting the
drive as 149.05g instead of the 160g the BIOS reports?

To really fix the problem, I am willing, if need be, to
wipe the drive again spend another night reinstalling
everything.
Thanks..

Semantics.. Difference in what *is* a Gigabyte and what is being advertised.

Here are your realistic and actual numbers...

Advertised --- Actual Capacity
10GB --- 9.31 GB
20GB --- 18.63 GB
30GB --- 27.94 GB
40GB --- 37.25 GB
60GB --- 55.88 GB
80GB --- 74.51 GB
100GB --- 93.13 GB
120GB --- 111.76 GB
160GB --- 149.01 GB
180GB --- 167.64 GB
200GB --- 186.26 GB
250GB --- 232.83 GB

 

[David Candy]

Hard drives use MEGA (10^6) or GIGA (10^9) bytes. However computers, except for hard drive manufacturers, use Gi (2^30) Bytes.

KByte = 1 000 (10^3)
KiByte = 1 024 (2^10)
MByte = 1 000 000 (10^6)
MiByte = 1 048 576 (2^20)

Because Ki, Mi, and Gi are newer SI terms, and weren't in existance when MS was a twinkle in Paul's and Bill's eyes computers use MByte to mean MiByte.

GiByte (2^30) = 1 073 741 824

149.5 * 1 073 741 824 = 160 524 402 688

Therefore you have no problem.

If hard drive manufacturers sold memory you would buy (say a 512 MB chip) as a 537 MByte memory chip.

 

[Guest]

You need a 3rd party tool to combine a current partition with unallocated
space. If you want to do it without suc a tool, trash your 40GB partition and
remake a new partition with all the unpartitioned space. To do this, go to
control panel/performance and maintenance/administrative tools and click on
Computer Management. Go to the disk management tab, and right click on the
partition you want removed. Once you have done that, make a new partition
with the remaining space using the same program.

BTW your reported disk size is normal, you don't actually have 160GB of
usable space. The BIOS lists it in metric terms, Windows lists it in binary
equivalent terms. I hope this helps. I fint it curious that you had to use
FAT32 instead of NTFS, can you explain in more detail?

 

[neil]

Thanks for your help. Do you have recommendation for a
partition manager?

Also, can anyone confirm XP SP2 contains the fixes for
EnablebigLBA that SP1 did? If so, why didn't SP2 install
EnablebigLBA=1 on installation?

As for me using Fat32, I have much more experience using
FAT32. This is my first time using NTFS. I hope it is
better than FAT32 performance and recovery wise. I wanted
to stop XP from installing and used FAT32 as I knew the
associated Fdisk was a safe bet to restore the drive to a
bare drive.

Can you tell my why XP SP2 placed 69g of freespace and 21g
unallocated? Why wasn't all freespace or unallocated so
that I can create one large partition. I have no extended
partitions on this drive. After setting up both, the 69g
formatted to logical drive and the 21 unallocated
formatted to a primary partition. Do you think they are
stable and usable configured the way they are?

I understand what all of you are saying about the actual
disk size reported but why then, does my other Western
Digital 60g EIDE and Seagate 9g SCSI hard drive actually
report the correct drive size in Disk Manager when the new
160g is reported with less?


Is there a way to get SP1?

Thanks..

Neil

 

[Neil]

Thanks for your help. Do you have recommendation for a
partition manager?

Also, can anyone confirm XP SP2 contains the fixes for
EnablebigLBA that SP1 did? If so, why didn't SP2 install
EnablebigLBA=1 on installation?

As for me using Fat32, I have much more experience using
FAT32. This is my first time using NTFS. I hope it is
better than FAT32 performance and recovery wise. I wanted
to stop XP from installing and used FAT32 as I knew the
associated Fdisk was a safe bet to restore the drive to a
bare drive.

Can you tell my why XP SP2 placed 69g of freespace and 21g
unallocated? Why wasn't all freespace or unallocated so
that I can create one large partition. I have no extended
partitions on this drive. After setting up both, the 69g
formatted to logical drive and the 21 unallocated
formatted to a primary partition. Do you think they are
stable and usable configured the way they are?

I understand what all of you are saying about the actual
disk size reported but why then, does my other Western
Digital 60g EIDE and Seagate 9g SCSI hard drive actually
report the correct drive size in Disk Manager when the new
160g is reported with less?


Is there a way to get SP1?

Thanks..

Neil

 

[Guest]

Regarding the recommendation, I find Partitionmagic to be very good (although
not free). I can't confirm whether the "Big" support is in SP2, but if it was
in the first one, it will be in the new one. I couldn't say why the registry
value wan't in there, maybe it isn't needed.

My guess as to the reason the remaining space was not put into one partition
is that the BIOS upgrade hadn't occured when the second partition was
created, not allowing all of it to be used. Also, Windows doesn't
automatically create the partitions, either, you have to do that yourself and
specify how big you want the partitions. You may have done this in the
process of installing Windows originally, when the SP2 hadn't been installed.

What steps did you follow to make the partitions the way they are? In other
words, when did you ask Windows to use the unpartitioned space to make the
remaining partition with respect to the SP2 and BIOS upgrades. The partitions
you describe as having (20, 40, 69.4) add up to approximately 137GB if you do
the conversions, so I suspect the remaining space was created before the
"Big" support was enabled.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I bought a Western Digital 160g EIDE hard drive and
proceeded to do a new installtion of XP. When I first set
up a partition on the drive, formatted NTFS, my BIOS could
not see the whole 160g. Researched the problem and found
out I need to upgrade BIOS, which I did. Bios now reports
160g primary master. Tried to delete new NTFS parition
but was forced to format FAT32 over it. Used old Fdisk to
remove all partitions.

DON'T use FDISK for this. It falls over well before you get to this
size. Boot the XP CD direct. Enter Setup, and after the license
agreement take New Install. When it asks you to confirm where, hit ESC;
select and delete the current partition and make a new RAW one to be
formatted at the next stage. Keep that to a modest size - it is in any
case a mistake to try to install system and all on a partition of this
size

The important point is the delete. Without that it will just go ahead
and make a new install over the top of the old one

Once running, upgrade to at least SP1 so as to have 48 bit LBA support;
preferably have a free SP2 CD and run that as first action (and do not
go on the net until you have at least the basic firewall in place)

Now Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk
Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive.. Right
click in the Unallocated space and you will be able to make a partition
of the rest of it

 

[Andy]

Thanks for your help. Do you have recommendation for a
partition manager?

Also, can anyone confirm XP SP2 contains the fixes for
EnablebigLBA that SP1 did? If so, why didn't SP2 install
EnablebigLBA=1 on installation?

From:
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303013 [303013 - How to
enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives
in Windows XP
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];303013>:

Note The previous registry setting (referring to EnableBigLba) is
ignored in Windows XP SP1 and later.

As for me using Fat32, I have much more experience using
FAT32. This is my first time using NTFS. I hope it is
better than FAT32 performance and recovery wise. I wanted
to stop XP from installing and used FAT32 as I knew the
associated Fdisk was a safe bet to restore the drive to a
bare drive.

Can you tell my why XP SP2 placed 69g of freespace and 21g
unallocated? Why wasn't all freespace or unallocated so
that I can create one large partition.

The reason this happened is because you created the 40GB logical
drive, which caused the Windows XP setup program to create an extended
partition with the rest of the drive that it was able to see at that
time. After installing SP1 or SP2, use Disk Management to delete the
40GB partition. Then you will be able to create an extended partition
that encompasses the rest of the entire drive.