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48-bit addressing?

T

TripleB

Junior Member
I'm planning on buying a Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive, but from reading on a few sites, I've heard of a problem of reconizing drives larger than 137.4GB. I'm getting a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and a Chaintech "VNF3-250" NForce 3 250 mobo with the hard drive. I will also be installing Windows Me until Windows releases a retail version of a 64-bit operating system. How will my hard drive work with the rest of my system?
 
The problem is that the OS may not recognize the full capacity of the drive until a registry change is performed. I don't know how this affects ME, but you may need to format it with the largest capacity that the setup will allow you to, then use a program like partition magic to resize the drive to its full size, or create another partition in the unformatted space.

Do you really want to install ME though? You'd be better off with 2K or XP and those I know for sure can support drives over 137 GB.
 
I would go up to XP or 2K but right now I don't want to spend the money to go up to those and then upgrade to XP 64. The only Windows installation disk I have is the ME that came with my Dell three years ago.
 
Any AMD64/Opteron system should be new enough that this won't be an issue, all of them should have system BIOS support for 48-bit LBA.

As far as the OS goes, make sure that you are using WinXP + SP1a, and install the "48bit LBA flush cache/hibernation" hotfix from MS too. (Should also be included in SP2, when it is released.)

Oh, WinME.. I don't think that it will support 48-bit LBA, unless you use a 3rd-party PCI IDE controller card, that shows up as SCSI in the Device Manager. (Such as a Promise Ultra100/133 TX2 card, which I personally use and would recommend.)

Any reason why you don't want to simply install the 32-bit version of WinXP in the meantime, instead of WinME?

Edit: If that is a Dell "Restore CD", and not a regular WinME installation CD, then you might not even be able to install it onto this new system. Most major OEM restore CDs are locked to the BIOS of their particular mobos, and will not install on different ones.

If you manage to get it to install, and insist on running WinME with the HD on the onboard IDE ports, then you must limit your use of the drive to the lower 127GB. (Although, if the BIOS supports 48-bit LBA, it might be possible to run in "MS-DOS Compatibility Mode" for the HDs, in order to route all disk-access calls through the BIOS. However your disk performance will take a MAJOR hit, probably between 10-20 times slower than using the normal WinME protected-mode disk access drivers. That's the reason I suggest getting a PCI IDE controller card.

Actually, does anyone know if the NVidia system drivers for Win9x/ME, will support protected-mode access to 48-bit LBA HDs? If they do, then you may be in luck. I overlooked that possibility at first.

The problem is, most normal IDE "miniport" drivers, still are accessed though the main MS IDE "port" driver ("ESDI_506.pdr"), which is where the limitation on support of 48-bit LBA lays. A 3rd-party PCI IDE controller card that shows up as a SCSI device, bypasses the IDE port/miniport driver entirely, and therefore bypasses the limitation as well. Support for 48-bit LBA in that case, is dependent on the controller card drivers alone.
 
Hmmm, it looks like I'll have to use XP if I want to use my whole hard drive. How much would a Windows XP disk cost?
 
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