help! 300gb hard drive reads as 127gb

[imported_samantha]

Hi everyone,

Im not too good with this computer stuff, but my husband and I just bought a new Seagate 300gb hard drive for our home computer but windows is reading it as 127gb. I dont know what to do!! The computer is a p4 3.0 ghz, Asus motherboard with Windows 2000 installed. What ever that means.

Can anyone give me some advice....please?

Thanks!

Samantha

 

[Megatomic]

You have just encountered the old 127GB drive size limit Samantha. You will have to set up the drive with the Seatools that came with it for your system to recognize it as a 300GB drive.

Can you post your computer's specs, you may be able to make a change to your BIOS that will allow the full drive size.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Here's some additional info:

http://techpatterns.com/forums/about260.html
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/print.php/1489651
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

 

[cubby1223]

Take out the hard drive & reboot the machine. Add this value to the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0x1


Just make this change to the registry, do not run any other hard drive setup tools.

 

[AL BE]

 

[imported_samantha]

ok, I took out the hardrive, rebooted, and changed the registry and rebooted again. Nothing happened!! AHHH! what do I do!?

 

[BadThad]

Added as a secondary drive? If so, just partition it using Drive Manager!

 

[imported_samantha]

I checked the BIOS and its a master drive.

Nothing seems to be working...

*sigh*

 

[cubby1223]

do you have service pack 4 installed?

 

[imported_samantha]

yea, I installed service pack 4. Ok, I looked at the BIOS again, and my cd-rom is the primary IDE and my hard drive is the third IDE, is this ok??

 

[BadThad]

OK, I see you are quite clueless, lol.

Your system sounds like it SHOULD be setup like this:

PRIMARY IDE CHANNEL

Master - Your old hard drive w/ Win2k
Slave - Your new 300GB drive

SECONDARY IDE CHANNEL

Master - CDROM

Check your connnections and drive jumpers, this is how it SHOULD be. Don't use CABLE SELECT for any of the drives!

Next, boot into Win2k, right click MY COMPUTER>MANAGE>DISK MANAGER. You will see the drive listed in there and you should be able to partition/format the drive from there. Just make partitions of like 100GB and your problems will be over.