Help 180 Gig Hard drive , though windows says 128 gig

[djkball]

We have purchased a few 180 gig hard drives to use for data storeage but the thing is that they only see 128 gig in disk management . The bios understand that these drives are 180 gig but windows doesnt . We have tried both windows XP and 2000 , then also installed all the service packs and patches . Still no help.

Has anyone else ran into a problem like this at all ? Please post your comments

 

[dbwillis]

Are the drives on a newer board that supports above 137GB drives? (something like 48 bit addressing I think)

 

[rbayer]

ATA only supports 28 bits of sector addressing, which translates to 137GB (using the manufacturer's definition that a GB is one billion bytes). If your IDE controller doesn't support the new 48-bit addressing, there's not much you can do except possibly get a separate controller card. ATA/133, I believe, supports 48-bit addressing, which allows up to 144115188GB, assuming I did all my math correctly.

 

[Trashman]

Could it be that your using the FAT32 file system????....128GB is the size limitation....he stated that the board see's the full 180GB....If your using the FAT32 file system you have 2 options....Partition the drive or chnage to the NTFS....which can handle large disks.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: djkball
We have purchased a few 180 gig hard drives to use for data storeage but the thing is that they only see 128 gig in disk management . The bios understand that these drives are 180 gig but windows doesnt . We have tried both windows XP and 2000 , then also installed all the service packs and patches . Still no help.

I was going to ask about service packs, but you covered it. Just in case, you do need SP1 (details here). The file system question below is a good one, but your saying disk management is only seeing the smaller size (presumably this is before you format?)

Bill

 

[Hessakia]

Originally posted by: rbayer
ATA only supports 28 bits of sector addressing, which translates to 137GB (using the manufacturer's definition that a GB is one billion bytes). If your IDE controller doesn't support the new 48-bit addressing, there's not much you can do except possibly get a separate controller card. ATA/133, I believe, supports 48-bit addressing, which allows up to 144115188GB, assuming I did all my math correctly.

almost correct, ATA100 supports only 28bits, while ATA133 supports 48bits... a new ATA133 controller card will solve y our problem (or some dumb boot manager that is usually given with large drives--ezdrive maybe?)


its not fat32, cuz i've had 2 seperate 160gig drives in fat32 partitions.

the controller card is the answer....

 

[djkball]

Even though the hard drive is seem the system bios as a 180 gig drive it might still need another controller card ?

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: djkball
Even though the hard drive is seem the system bios as a 180 gig drive it might still need another controller card ?

The system BIOS is probably just reading the name string attached to the drive, it isn't actually reading the drive's size.