Another weird hard drive issue

[wraith3k]

So I installed Win2k SP4 to a 200GB SATA drive, only to see that it already is using the drive to the maximum capacity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought win2k did not already have large LBA support enabled. I was sure win2k would have made me make a 137gb partition first during the setup, but it recognized the entire drive. I did go ahead and make the correct registry change anyway though once in windows (to enable lba), but I'm just afraid I might run into data corruption down the road if it tries to write to an area above the 137 gb barrier. I was going to use partition magic to resize the whole thing to 200, but with the way it is now it appears I don't need to. Anyone have some guidance?

 

[Viper96720]

2k SP2 and before didn't but had to change registry. But SP3 and after did

 

[wraith3k]

So basically you're saying I don't need to do anything else, I can just go ahead and use the drive like normal? Any way to confirm the actual size?

 

[VirtualLarry]

As I understand it, officially, W2K SP3 and later support 48-bit LBA, but like you, I'm slightly unsure about whether the "EnableBigLBA" registry key needs to be manually set as well. I'm pretty sure that it did in SP3, perhaps it doesn't have to be in SP4, I don't know. I know that using a seperate controller card like a Promise Ultra100 PCI IDE, that looks like a SCSI card to the OS, can bypass the entire issue, because it relies on the SCSI miniport to provide 48-bit LBA, rather than the IDE port driver.

 

[wraith3k]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
As I understand it, officially, W2K SP3 and later support 48-bit LBA, but like you, I'm slightly unsure about whether the "EnableBigLBA" registry key needs to be manually set as well. I'm pretty sure that it did in SP3, perhaps it doesn't have to be in SP4, I don't know. I know that using a seperate controller card like a Promise Ultra100 PCI IDE, that looks like a SCSI card to the OS, can bypass the entire issue, because it relies on the SCSI miniport to provide 48-bit LBA, rather than the IDE port driver.

I went ahead and set it anyway even though it appears windows was seeing the entire drive. I just don't want to run into that problem where after filling up 137gb, it starts writing over at the start of the drive (this has happened to people who haven't fully prepped their drive for this type of thing)