Hi everyone,
I'm currently testing new hard disks for use in new systems.
These hard disks will be 160 and 250GB sized.
Now the problem is that we're using W2K SP4, and apprently, it will not support +127GB disks by default, a special key needs to be added to the registry :
EnableBigLba (DWORD value 1) under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
While the systems i'm testing don't need that much HDD space (40GB is more then sufficient), using these bigger disks (current standard size) is way cheaper rather then looking for <120GB drives, but the question is whether this registry key is needed for correct operation of the system.
If i don't add it, the disks will be recognized by W2K as being 127GB, everything seems to work fine, but i've been seeing strange things:
I have a tool which i use to test hard drivers, this tool will write a hard disk full of files being a random size (between 1kb and 1GB) and containing random data.
After each file is written, the tool will keep a Checksum of the file, then afterwards the files will be read again, and a checksum will be made, the 2 checksums (written and read data) will be compared, and when there's a mismatch, an error will be shown saying that data corruption has occurred.
Now the problem is that the tool has given me a couple of those errors with those big hard disks...
When this happens, even W2k is totally messed up, a lot of strange errors are shown (e.g. when pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL : TaskMgr.exe is corrupt and unreadable 🙂), when the system is rebooted it will not start again : failed to load OS is shown.
I know what you're thinking : "why don't you just put 2 systems next to eachother, one WITH BigLba enable, and one WITHOUT BigLba enabled?"
While that's certainly the best way to test, it won't prove anything to me, because the problems i'm getting are very intermittent, at one time i had them after 15mins of testing, but last week i had 4 systems running for 2 weeks straight, and none of them showed any problems at all...
So that's why i hope that anyone can tell me when those problems could be cause by the absence of the BigLba key...
any help will be appreciated
I'm currently testing new hard disks for use in new systems.
These hard disks will be 160 and 250GB sized.
Now the problem is that we're using W2K SP4, and apprently, it will not support +127GB disks by default, a special key needs to be added to the registry :
EnableBigLba (DWORD value 1) under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
While the systems i'm testing don't need that much HDD space (40GB is more then sufficient), using these bigger disks (current standard size) is way cheaper rather then looking for <120GB drives, but the question is whether this registry key is needed for correct operation of the system.
If i don't add it, the disks will be recognized by W2K as being 127GB, everything seems to work fine, but i've been seeing strange things:
I have a tool which i use to test hard drivers, this tool will write a hard disk full of files being a random size (between 1kb and 1GB) and containing random data.
After each file is written, the tool will keep a Checksum of the file, then afterwards the files will be read again, and a checksum will be made, the 2 checksums (written and read data) will be compared, and when there's a mismatch, an error will be shown saying that data corruption has occurred.
Now the problem is that the tool has given me a couple of those errors with those big hard disks...
When this happens, even W2k is totally messed up, a lot of strange errors are shown (e.g. when pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL : TaskMgr.exe is corrupt and unreadable 🙂), when the system is rebooted it will not start again : failed to load OS is shown.
I know what you're thinking : "why don't you just put 2 systems next to eachother, one WITH BigLba enable, and one WITHOUT BigLba enabled?"
While that's certainly the best way to test, it won't prove anything to me, because the problems i'm getting are very intermittent, at one time i had them after 15mins of testing, but last week i had 4 systems running for 2 weeks straight, and none of them showed any problems at all...
So that's why i hope that anyone can tell me when those problems could be cause by the absence of the BigLba key...
any help will be appreciated
