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hard drive problem

A

alien42

Lifer
so last week i was hit by a horrible virus and i just finished formatting my primary drive and re-installed win xp pro. i have a second 300GB storage drive that i hooked up to a friends computer with win xp he via a SATA to USB convertor. i downloaded a LAN driver to my 300GB drive and then hooked it back up to my computer. suddenly my computer says the drive is not formatted and windows only sees 128GB (however the BIOS shows 300GB when booting). thinking it may be something with my computer i hook it back up to my friends computer and the same problem occurs.

any ideas on how this happened and what i can do to remedy it without re-formatting.
 
ok, i figured out what caused the problem but have not resolved the problem. my win XP cd is pre sp1 which did not recognize drives over 128GB. i have updated windows to sp2 however it still says the drive needs to be formatted.
 
Originally posted by: niji1875
I think it needs to be formatted to solve this problem.
Click to expand...
that is the very last resort as i have a lot of data on the drive. i am going to try partition magic tonight and if that does not work then i will attempt to partition the space that is beyond the 128GB
 
Did you properly "disconnect" it from the OS or just transfered your files and unplugged the drive? XPSP1 should recognize drives over 128GB.
 
I read something about having to enable 48-bit LBA in windows to get it to recognize big drives, but I'm not too sure on the specifics. All I know is I have a driver called 48bitlba.inf that I always install, and after loading up my chipset drivers, everything seems to work fine.

The fact that windows recognizes the drive but doesn't see the full size might also have to do with your BIOS settings. Seeing as it's SATA, I don't know if you can set any settings anyways (at least on my nf7s-v2, which uses a standalone chip for sata support). Also make sure that you have all the drivers on your mobo manu.'s support page downloaded and installed, as sometimes there are additional drivers needed outside the platform drivers.

BTW... the 48bit LBA driver I have seems to just be a registry addition:
"HKLM,"System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters","EnableBigLba",0x10001,1 "
I'd imagine this basically means to create a dword value called "EnableBigLba" with a value of "1" in the registry path above. Seems worth a try...
 
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