160gb HD in my BX board, how does it even work?

[d33pt]

Ok, so I got this 160gb HD and first thing I did was put it in my Abit BX6-2. It only came up in Drive Mgmt as 130gb or so. So I took it and put it in a PC with ATA133 support and bios recognized it as 160, but Win2k would only see 130gb again. So I did the EnableBigLBA in the registry and reboot and was able to get the drive to be recognized as the full 160. After a full format, i put it back in my BX board again just for the heck of it (i didn't even do the reg hack for BigLBA) and the full 160gb is now recognized and I am able to copy files to it. Am I just asking for trouble using it in this MB? How does it even work?

 

[redbeard1]

My guess is because win2k/xp can access drives seperately from what the bios says. A friend of mine found, in an old motherboard that only supported 8 gig drives, that when he put a 13 gig in, and was going to be happy with only the 8 gig, that when he went into disk management after he installed win2k, he could see the remainder of the drive. He created another partition to use the last 5 gig. It seems to me that I've read something explaining this somewhere.

 

[Pariah]

It is HIGHLY recommended that you don't use a drive that large on a system that doesn't fully support that capacity. Win2k has support for LargeATA drives so it may recognize the full capacity, however that doesn't mean the drive will work properly. If you don't have a controller or ATA driver that supports that capacity whenever you try to write on any part of the drive past 128GB the drive will rollover to the beginning of the drive and start writing from there. So with your 160GB drive if you tried to fill the drive completely, it would overwrite the first 32GB or so after it passed the 128GB point.