Is there a maximum hard drive capacity for motherboard and/or OS?

[harrisk29]

I recently built a PC with a Gigabyte GA-H55-USB (Bios F4) motherboard running Windows XP SP3 32 bit OS. I have the OS sitting on an 80GB SATA hard drive and am trying to add an additional (5) 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS drives. The motherboard has (7) SATA connectors. All (6) drives were detected at one point but now (1) of them won't show up in BIOS or Windows. Is there a setting that I am missing or a capacity restriction? Any insight anyone can provide would be great.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

It depends on the cluster size, but the minimum maximum for a 32bit NTFS OS (such as XP Pro 32) is 16TB. [ClusterSize^32 - Cluster] This is not your issue. A cable, port, or drive is most likely bad. Try a flash.

 

[mfenn]

The max volume size when using an MBR-type partition table (only thing XP supports) is 2TB. Not relevant to your current situation though.

Like Sphinx says, sounds like a bad connection or dead drive.

 

[TheStu]

Also, non-EFI systems have a 4TB/drive limit don't they?

 

[harrisk29]

We thought we had a bad drive once before and replaced it with this one, brand new, as was the first one that is why I was leaning toward the motherboard not supported this many drives with this much capacity.

 

[TheStu]

Are the drives in RAID?

 

[harrisk29]

They are not in RAID. They were formatted with NTFS and are a basic (not dynamic) drive with a single partition. We plan to use them as backup drives that will auto copy to an external usb device each night.

 

[mfenn]

We thought we had a bad drive once before and replaced it with this one, brand new, as was the first one that is why I was leaning toward the motherboard not supported this many drives with this much capacity.

The motherboard doesn't care about the capacity of the disks, it only cares about how many SATA channels are in use. If it didn't support that many disks, why you they put that many SATA connectors on the mobo?

You could also have a bad physical connection (bad cable, cracked solder joint on mobo) or a flaky SATA controller.

Just to be clear, have you tried replacing the drive that currently isn't detected? Does the drive work in another computer?

 

[harrisk29]

The 1st time around, the drive showed up but then disappeared when we rebooted. We replaced with another new drive and this one showed up and appeared to be accessible until we formatted it and now it won't show up again.

 

[tcsenter]

The motherboard doesn't care about the capacity of the disks, it only cares about how many SATA channels are in use.

The motherboard BIOS cares about disk capacity. It is responsible for exposing that capacity to the OS.

 

[mfenn]

The motherboard BIOS cares about disk capacity. It is responsible for exposing that capacity to the OS.

Right, but it doesn't care about the total amount of storage in the system, it doesn't deal it anything more abstract than a disk.

 

[harrisk29]

When the drives are detected, they are detected with the correct size, we just can't seem to keep all (6) drives recognized in the BIOS and in Windows. Sorry if I am making this confusing

 

[mfenn]

When the drives are detected, they are detected with the correct size, we just can't seem to keep all (6) drives recognized in the BIOS and in Windows. Sorry if I am making this confusing

Try to narrow it down by port and by drive. Is there a certain port that always flakes out, or is there a certain drive that refuses to be detected if you move it around between ports?

Also, are you using AHCI or IDE-compatibility mode? Try switching between the two. When testing these out, I would probably just check which are detected by the BIOS, as Windows XP doesn't like switching between AHCI and IDE.

 

[harrisk29]

Yes, that was going to be my next test was to figure out which drive is not being detected and then try plugging in a functioning drive to that connector. I have tried AHCI in the BIOS but Windows XP refuses to boot when I use that option and as I recall gives me the blue screen of death.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Unless you are extremely unlucky, the board does not support all 7 channels, a port or something in between the drive and the OS is bad.

Simplest is to flash the BIOS and go from there.
AHCI driver?
Latest drivers for everything
Reinstall the OS (maybe not worth it)
RMA mobo

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Yes, that was going to be my next test was to figure out which drive is not being detected and then try plugging in a functioning drive to that connector. I have tried AHCI in the BIOS but Windows XP refuses to boot when I use that option and as I recall gives me the blue screen of death.

You need to install the AHCI driver during the OS install (at least with Vista), if XP will even deal with it. I can't remember if XP ever had AHCI functionality.

 

[mfenn]

Yes, that was going to be my next test was to figure out which drive is not being detected and then try plugging in a functioning drive to that connector. I have tried AHCI in the BIOS but Windows XP refuses to boot when I use that option and as I recall gives me the blue screen of death.

Well, yes that's to be expected. The question is, do all the drives appear in the AHCI BIOS when the screen goes by?

Once you've determined whether or not all of the drives are present, you will have to use the F6 for drivers technique (or upgrade to a modern OS ).

 

[harrisk29]

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I will try a few things tomorrow and see if I can make any progress. I placed a ticket with Gigabyte as well to see if they can help.