Silly HD question by someone with over 1,000 posts

[Texun]

It's been a while... 😕

Is it necessary to have SP2 installed in WinXP (or SP4 in Win2K) to read a 160g drive in a USB enclosure if it already has multiple partitions under 137g's?

 

[Baked]

Well, do you have SP1 installed? That will do the trick for 137GB+ recognition. I way I do it is install WinXP + SP2 on a 20GB HD, then clone it to a bigger HD with Ghost.

 

[hoppa]

Originally posted by: Texun
Is it necessary to have SP2 installed in WinXP (or SP4 in Win2K) to read a 160g drive in a USB enclosure if it already has multiple partitions under 137g's?

no.

 

[Bozo Galora]

SP1 includes the 48 bit LBA registry entry, but it may not be enabled when you look after install if you use third party partitioner.

As was said, you can even have a 1 terabyte dr, but if your partitions are under 137 it doesnt matter - you dont even need SP1

However, to be safe, since we are dealing with "real" and "phoney" MB here, its best to keep all partition 125 or less, so one doesn even have to stop and think about actual digital sizes.

 

[Bozo Galora]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=303013

http://www.alegsa.com.ar/Visit...20gb%20hard%20disk.php

 

[stevty2889]

If it already has multiple partions, and they are both smaller than 137gb, then you shouldn't have any problem seeing the partions. Only if you had one large partition larger than 137gb.

 

[Texun]

I didn't think it was necessary but wanted to double check before I picked up the drive. I've got the SP's but haven't slipstreamed them into XP or 2K yet. I'll Ghost the OS to the drive, but when I change boards again the Ghost images will no longer be usable and I didn't want to get stuck with my patches on a drive I couldn't fully access. Thanks, and Happy New Year! :beer: