Computer nerd question

[eagl]

A question - when you did the windows XP installation, was the hard drive already formatted?  Did it give you the option to use an existing partition or create a new one?

Windows is pretty good about detecting issues like this during installation and enabling whatever is necessary to get the full drive space available.  So to help troubleshoot more, we need to know exactly what options windows gave you during the installation.

If it gave you the option of repartitioning the drive or deleting the existing partition and repartitioning, you probably needed to delete the existing partition and have windows repartition the drive.

What I'm worried about is that you mentioned using the "utility provided", but those utilities may not be as good as the partition tool built into windows setup during installation.

[eagl]

I had a similiar problem with my wife's laptop, going from a 20 gig to an 80 gig hard drive.  I tried everything I could, bios updates, hard drive soft-bios overlays, several different utilities.  Nothing worked until I installed windows from scratch out of desperation.  At the windows setup question asking about where to install windows, I selected the choices to completely wipe and repartition/reformat the drive.  And windows somehow figured it out and allowed the use of the whole drive.

That said, if you go into bios, the hard drive settings should be set to "auto" and you should be using the latest bios available for the motherboard.

[SteveBailey]

Windows install also limited me to the 137 gig.

[SteveBailey]

HD's are set to auto by default on my mobo

[eagl]

Short summary answer - I think you need to skip the use of the included utility that came with the hard drive and re-install windows.  During installation, you need to tell windows setup to repartition and reformat the hard drive using all available space.

An optional step would be to use that utility disk to wipe the existing partition before running windows setup again so that windows sees a completely bare hard drive from the beginning, but this may not be necessary.

If it doesn't work, then I'm stumped.

[SteveBailey]

Is there any easy way to see if my bios is 48-bit laba compatible?

I would be stunned if it isn't... the mobo is a month old.

[SteveBailey]

I think I may have found a problem.  microsoft says I need to go to:

Go to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters

and :

Next set the EnableBigLba registry value to 1 in that registry key. Exit Regedit and reboot.


But when I get there, all I see is:




the "EnableBigLba registry value" is nowhere to be found

[eagl]

I have no idea about 48 bit lba.  There is no reason why that hard drive, a reasonably new mobo, and windows should not work together.

I am pretty much convinced that the problem is with the utility that came with the hard drive, and that a fresh installation attempt with a completely bare unpartitioned drive will be more successful.

It is remotely possible that you have a really old version of windows XP and the installer can't handle large hard drives, but I kind of doubt it.

[SteveBailey]

I do have on old version of XP... but have SP 2 and it is fully updated.  I'm really scratching  my head here.  Thanks for all your help and time.

[Kermit de frog]

You could always buy a new WinXP disk that has SP2 on it already

[2bighorn]

Originally posted by SteveBailey
the "EnableBigLba registry value" is nowhere to be found

# From the Edit menu, select New, DWORD Value.
# Enter the name EnableBigLba, then press Enter.
# Double-click the new value, set it to 1, then click OK.
# Close the registry editor.
# Restart the machine for the change to take effect.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Good old partition magic works wonders when you have to resize or split harddrives.

[Skuzzy]

Originally posted by SteveBailey
I do have on old version of XP... but have SP 2 and it is fully updated.  I'm really scratching  my head here.  Thanks for all your help and time.

Here is the issue.  The original releases of XP had borked up the 48 bit LBA support (one of the many reasons to never be on the bleeding edge, stuff is borked).  If you are unlucky enough to be stuck with an old version, even with the installation of SP2, XP will not allow you to get past 138GB per volume.

You can force it, but MS pretty much gaurantees you will have corrupt data if you do.  I have tested this and sure enough, you get corrupted data.

You actually need a copy of XP that already has SP2 installed.  While there are earlier versions of XP which work, the best cut-off I have been able to find is using a copy od XP with SP2 installed already.

EDIT:  By the way, there are utlities out there, like Seagate's format and partioning program, which will automatically make the patches to the Windows registry to enable the 48 bit LBA support.  While that soulnds good, these programs do not actually test and verify it will work correctly.

[SteveBailey]

Roy and everyone, thanks so much for taking the time to help me!

The solution presented itself last night when my head hit the pillow.  I had tried to use DISKPART  to extend the partition, as discussed earlier in the thread, but I couldn't because you cannot extend the partition on the system disk.

So, when I woke up this morning I switched the boot priorities on my HD's, thus making the old disk the system disk.  I went back into  DISKPART and extended the partition in question, without any problems.  This whole process took me less that 5 minutes.  LOL, I couldn't believe I didn't think of this.  Funny stuff huh?


Thanks again, everyone!



Steve

[StarOfAfrica2]

Umm .......... isnt that what eagl said to do in the first place? lol