Hello All,
I am making preparations for installing a Western Digital Special Edition 180GB hard drive into my system, which is using an Abit IT7 motherboard featuring a Highpoint HPT374 RAID controller and also an Intel i845 chipset. I am reading this Microsoft article (How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP) and the following excerpt confuses me a little:
NOTE: 48-bit LBA support will not be enabled and therefore supported until Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Professional is officially released and installed. Manually enabling 48-bit LBA support on Windows XP Without SP1 installed could lead to potential data loss.
This confuses me in that I have XP Professional already installed on a boot disk (20GB WDC) on the HPT374 controller and SP1 was installed as part of the OS install from the get go. If I do a search for EnableBigLba in the registry nothing is found. A search on 48bit finds only one entry on the following registry key:
My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\OpenSaveMRU\inf
This means little if anything to the Microsoft 303013 article. So, how does one tell if 48-bit LBA is already installed on the operating system level? So, if this isn't enough to confuse you then let me try to daze you .... read this from Intel. And yes, by default I installed the Intel Application Accelerator as a basic utility found on the Abit IT7 motherboard CD-ROM.
If you drill down into the Intel website, you find this notice explaining the consequences of removing the Application Accelerator. Of course, I am assuming that this only pertains to disks connected to the regular IDE controllers and not the Highpoint HPT374 also on the motherboard. BUT, like the Microsoft article nothing is mentioned to verifying if the support is installed/enabled prior to connecting a disk >137GB.
Ok, if I managed to 'daze' OR 'confuse' you thus far, let me see if I can get whichever one you are not suffering from at the moment. Being that the Highpoint HPT374 RAID controller supports both RAID 0, 1, and 0+1, I would imagine that at the release of this motherboard product (with the onboard controller with it) the possability of a stripe array being [attempted to be] created >137GB surely existed.
I base this conclusion on that when I bought the IT7 when it was first released the 80GB Special Edition WDC drives were out and 8 RAIDed 80GB drives striped would create an array of 640GB. Thus, I sent an email to Highpoint asking them if their HPT374 RAID, which was on my Abit IT7 product, supported disks about the 137GB mark. This is what I received as a reply:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us!
Yes. We have fixed the 48bit LBA formatting issue. We also can provide the
driver and bios, but the driver and bios need match. The largest supported
hard disk is 144PB (petabytes£¬1 petabytes=1000 thousand GB).
You may use v1.22 or later driver and bios.You will see the correct
capacity in BIOS and OS.
Regards,
HighPoint Technologies, Inc.
First, I am not inspired by Highpoint's intelligence, here, in that the glaring mistake of 1-PB = 1000-GB. We all remember our Latin prefixes, and 1-PB = 1000-TB = 1000000-GB. I think he meant to say TB and not PB (Terabyte and not Petabyte). 144 TB array capability would mean each of the eight (8) attachable devices could be 18-TB in size provided the proper RAID controller BIOS and matching drivers were installed.
First, I have no idea how to flash a RAID controller's BIOS, and presume the driver can be floppy-loaded if this monster drive is to be a boot disk, or later if a non-boot disk. Furthermore, I suppose I'll need to dig through the Highpoint website for the appropriate BIOS & driver as the Highpoint rep did not include this information--I wish they'd get a support forum.
Finally, the Highpoint rep did not mention how to verify if the HPT374 controller with its defaultly-installed BIOS & driver is already 48-bot LBA enabled or not. I am thinking that Abit, Highpoint, Intel, and Microsoft are all keeping this a secret, hehe.
And before someone asks, yes the drive did include a new controller that supports 48-bit LBA but I do not want to ADD another peripheral card to my lean, mean, computing machine [if I don't have to]. I also posted this to Abit's forum to little avail.
I am making preparations for installing a Western Digital Special Edition 180GB hard drive into my system, which is using an Abit IT7 motherboard featuring a Highpoint HPT374 RAID controller and also an Intel i845 chipset. I am reading this Microsoft article (How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP) and the following excerpt confuses me a little:
NOTE: 48-bit LBA support will not be enabled and therefore supported until Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Professional is officially released and installed. Manually enabling 48-bit LBA support on Windows XP Without SP1 installed could lead to potential data loss.
This confuses me in that I have XP Professional already installed on a boot disk (20GB WDC) on the HPT374 controller and SP1 was installed as part of the OS install from the get go. If I do a search for EnableBigLba in the registry nothing is found. A search on 48bit finds only one entry on the following registry key:
My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\OpenSaveMRU\inf
This means little if anything to the Microsoft 303013 article. So, how does one tell if 48-bit LBA is already installed on the operating system level? So, if this isn't enough to confuse you then let me try to daze you .... read this from Intel. And yes, by default I installed the Intel Application Accelerator as a basic utility found on the Abit IT7 motherboard CD-ROM.
If you drill down into the Intel website, you find this notice explaining the consequences of removing the Application Accelerator. Of course, I am assuming that this only pertains to disks connected to the regular IDE controllers and not the Highpoint HPT374 also on the motherboard. BUT, like the Microsoft article nothing is mentioned to verifying if the support is installed/enabled prior to connecting a disk >137GB.
Ok, if I managed to 'daze' OR 'confuse' you thus far, let me see if I can get whichever one you are not suffering from at the moment. Being that the Highpoint HPT374 RAID controller supports both RAID 0, 1, and 0+1, I would imagine that at the release of this motherboard product (with the onboard controller with it) the possability of a stripe array being [attempted to be] created >137GB surely existed.
I base this conclusion on that when I bought the IT7 when it was first released the 80GB Special Edition WDC drives were out and 8 RAIDed 80GB drives striped would create an array of 640GB. Thus, I sent an email to Highpoint asking them if their HPT374 RAID, which was on my Abit IT7 product, supported disks about the 137GB mark. This is what I received as a reply:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us!
Yes. We have fixed the 48bit LBA formatting issue. We also can provide the
driver and bios, but the driver and bios need match. The largest supported
hard disk is 144PB (petabytes£¬1 petabytes=1000 thousand GB).
You may use v1.22 or later driver and bios.You will see the correct
capacity in BIOS and OS.
Regards,
HighPoint Technologies, Inc.
First, I am not inspired by Highpoint's intelligence, here, in that the glaring mistake of 1-PB = 1000-GB. We all remember our Latin prefixes, and 1-PB = 1000-TB = 1000000-GB. I think he meant to say TB and not PB (Terabyte and not Petabyte). 144 TB array capability would mean each of the eight (8) attachable devices could be 18-TB in size provided the proper RAID controller BIOS and matching drivers were installed.
First, I have no idea how to flash a RAID controller's BIOS, and presume the driver can be floppy-loaded if this monster drive is to be a boot disk, or later if a non-boot disk. Furthermore, I suppose I'll need to dig through the Highpoint website for the appropriate BIOS & driver as the Highpoint rep did not include this information--I wish they'd get a support forum.
Finally, the Highpoint rep did not mention how to verify if the HPT374 controller with its defaultly-installed BIOS & driver is already 48-bot LBA enabled or not. I am thinking that Abit, Highpoint, Intel, and Microsoft are all keeping this a secret, hehe.
And before someone asks, yes the drive did include a new controller that supports 48-bit LBA but I do not want to ADD another peripheral card to my lean, mean, computing machine [if I don't have to]. I also posted this to Abit's forum to little avail.
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