Big HDD woes

[SimonCrux]

I'm running XP Pro and I got a new Western Digital special edition 200 gigger- so I decided to reinstall cleanly on the new drive. My mobo is an Epox 8kha+ flashed to the newest bios. The mobo recognized the drive, but Windows saw it as only 137 gigs. I saw that SP1 was necessary to support large drives, but you can't exactly install the pack then format the drive that Windows is on. Formatting under Windows install yielded a 200 gig drive with 137 gigs free. I've been ignoring the problem until recently; does anyone know a way to simply resize the partition with a third-party program? I tried 7tools partition manager but it saw the 63 gigs as used too. I really want to use this drive as my boot drive, due to its extra speed over my 2meg cache drives. It hasn't looked like the bundled IDE controller card is necessary, as my bios recognizes the drive without problems. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[nater]

I just installed the same 200 gig drive. Did you read the blue paper that came with the package? It outlines your options. They say to either use the controller card (which is what I'm doing) or to use Intel's Application Accelerator. There might be a better solution out there, but you might want to try one of those.

 

[SimonCrux]

When I use the controller card with the drive as my boot drive, the computer hangs at the point where the card is detecting the drives attached to it. It does work when I am using it as a secondary drive. I did not try Intel app accelerator since it looked like it was only designed for intel mobo chipsets. Plus it had a lot of warnings from people about the app screwing up their systems. Windows sees the drive as 200 gigs now, it just shows 63 gigs as used.

 

[dbarton]

I just installed a 160 drive but NOT as the boot drive. Not sure if that matters.

I booted up to win98 dos and fdisked/formatted from there.

When then reboot in win98, it saw all 160g.

 

[dbarton]

I just installed a 160 drive but NOT as the boot drive. Not sure if that matters.

I booted up to win98 dos and fdisked/formatted from there.

When then reboot in win98, it saw all 160g.

 

[EeyoreX]

A 200GB drive will only be reported by Windows as a 186.26GB drive. This is due to manufacturers using decimal capacities (where 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) while Windows uses binary capacities (where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes). Having said that... What is Partition Magic or Windows Disk Management reporting is using the remaining space on the hard drive? Is it another partition? What version of PM are you using? Older versions do not support large drives and the PowerQuest site only reprots the latest version as supporting partitions of up to 160GB. Personally, I don't feel it is the best idea to use one giant partition as my OS partition, and prefer to keep it at or under 20GB and seperate my data to the remaining space.

\Dan

 

[dbarton]

*After* installing my new 160 drive as a 150 and a 10, i read the paperwork.

It say I will have data loss unless I have a 133 controller. I have an Asus p4 so I think that only got a 100 controller, but dont recall.

I do have XP sp1, so does that mean i am safe?

The drive was formatted under 98 so I could use fat32.

 

[EeyoreX]

You don't need an ATA133 controller, if your board is recognizing the hard drive you are fine. What you do need though is a proper cable. If you are using an 80 pin ATA 100/133 ribbon/rounded cable you are alright. If you are using a 40 pin cable, then you will have data loss.

\Dan

 

[SimonCrux]

I'm using the cable that came with the hard drive, so I have no doubt that it is the proper 80 pin configuration. I have not had any problems with data loss, only the fact that it is showing used space that has no relevant data on it.

 

[kursplat]

1 - plug in your original drive as the boot drive (like it was to start with)

2 - plug in your 200gig drive as a secondary drive (check your jumpers)

3 - use windows xp's disk management to partion the 200gig however you like it. this way you can have SP1 installed already.

4 - pull old drive out and do a fresh install or image the old drive to the new one

good luck

 

[SimonCrux]

Surprisingly, all it took was a scandisk sweep. I feel like such a maroon.