ECS K7S5A PRO 5.0 support for 48 bit LBA/Large Drives?

[Hork]

I have the ECS K7S5A PRO and wondered how I can find out if the bios supports 48-bit LBA for large drive support under Windows XP Pro. Or with Windows XP Pro SP1, do I need a bios that supports it?

I'm building a machine from the ground up, and am just trying to install a 160 GB drive. I'm going to install Windows XP Pro, but don't have integrated SP1 so will have to download and install later.

Would prefer the whole 160 GB in one partition, but need to know if I can get away with doing that, and how.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hork

 

[Peter]

Note that partitioning is nothing to do with this, and that partitioning the drive doesn't help. 48-bit LBA is about PHYSICAL access to the drive's sectors; if you don't have it, anything beyond 128 GiB is unreachable, no matter whether there's a separate partition there or not.

That said, yes, the K7S5A's BIOS does do 48-bit LBA. Windows XP, without service pack and a registry hack, doesn't.

 

[Slapstick]

I have a 160 GB Seagate as a scratch drive and it's recognized without a problem on the same motherboard.

 

[Hork]

Originally posted by: Peter
Note that partitioning is nothing to do with this, and that partitioning the drive doesn't help. 48-bit LBA is about PHYSICAL access to the drive's sectors; if you don't have it, anything beyond 128 GiB is unreachable, no matter whether there's a separate partition there or not. That said, yes, the K7S5A's BIOS does do 48-bit LBA. Windows XP, without service pack and a registry hack, doesn't.

Thanks!

The instructions for installing the drive indicated I would need both a BIOS that supported 48-bit LBA as well as Windows XP + SP1 for 48-bit LBA support and to be able to have all 160 GB in one partition. Otherwise, it recommends installing a 137 GB partition, installing the OS, then coming back and using their utitilites to utilize the extra space.

I went ahead with the 137 GB partition because I have Windows XP without SP1, but after I upgrade to SP1 and turn on 48-bit LBA, I'll look at using a 3rd-party partition extender to use the whole 160 GB.

Thanks!

 

[Peter]

Exactly like that. You can't make a 160GB partition right from the start because the XP installation CD doesn't have SP1 included, so the partition you create during install won't be bigger than 128 GiB (137 GB).

 

[Hork]

The instructions mentioned that once I got 48-bit LBA enabled in BIOS and in WinXP+SP1, I could use a third-party partition extender to increase the partition size to 160GB. I've never used one of those. Can someone give me the name of some utitilities to do that, the less expensive the better?

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: Hork
The instructions mentioned that once I got 48-bit LBA enabled in BIOS and in WinXP+SP1, I could use a third-party partition extender to increase the partition size to 160GB. I've never used one of those. Can someone give me the name of some utitilities to do that, the less expensive the better?

Partition Magic will work, don't know about the price though.

 

[Hork]

I noticed Windows XP Pro has diskpart.exe which might do the trick with the "extend" command. I'm searching for some indication that this would work okay... I'd rather hear from someone that has used it successfully to extend their partition to 160GB from 137GB.

 

[Hork]

Just FYI, I was able to use diskpart.exe from safe mode in a command window to extend the partition.

 

[KF]

Not that anyone is interested, but here is another way that accomplishes this. Use the software that comes in the box with the HD to partition the HD as one 160G partition. You probably will have to choose "advanced" or something like that, otherwise an XP "compatible" partition is liable to end up being 137. (like it did with the Maxtor software, choosing automatic.) Make sure it is 160. DO NOT use the XP installer (minus SP1) to partition or format. Otherwise it will end up 137 G. Then install XP. Then SP1. Then the >137 G patch. At the end, XP sees all 160 G, even though reported sizes before that are "odd."

"Extending" does work, at least if all you have is unpartitioned space after the partition you extend. But whether this extended partition is completely standard, I could not determine. It could be a "dynamic" disk. I don't know. And that's why I redid it the way mentioned. As long as you never use another OS (like Linux), it won't matter. XP Home does not support "dynamic" disks, according to the docs.

 

[patman3d]

I had the same problem with my computer, but not on ECS, it was a Gigabyte, but I don't think there's a difference.
The way I got around it was to create 2 partitions. Only one was created during clean install of XP Pro w/o SP1. After installation, i installed SP1 from the Downloaded internet file. Then I used XP's disk management (typed diskmgmt.msc in the Run... box) and from there, it saw the entire 160gb (149.05gb) hard disk, and so i created the 2nd partition using the rest of the disk from there.
this is where i found the info: clicky here