200 GB WD Hard drive installation on WinXP

[Machine514]

I am having trouble installing my brand new 200GB Western Digital Hard drive.

Here's what I got.

The 200GB drive is running off an ATA controller card. I boot into WinXP home and WinXP sees the hard drive but only recognizes it as a 131GB hard drive. With the same settings, I boot with the Data Lifeguard Tools, ver 10 and it recognizes it as a 200GB hard drive. I try to format with the lifeguard tools and no matter what it wants to install an OS on it because it can not find one on any other hard drive. I have an OS!

The setting that I have tried are as follows. Jumper settings for cable select and master. I have also tried each of the jumper settings on IDE 1 and 2 on the controller card with the same results stated above.

Anyone have any ideas?

An idea that I have is that WinXP (or the BIOS, not too sure which) is trying to boot off of the controller card as the boot disk. I am going to look in BIOS and see how it reads the 200 GB hard drive. I am also going to try to set the jumpers as slave and put it in the slave position. Not sure if that will work though.

When I get this installed I am going to have 500GB of hard drive space!

-Machine

[sterno]

Sounds like you hit the 137GB IDE limit. To use larger drives your BIOS and ATA controller both need to support the 48-bit addressing. You also need at least XP Service Pack 1, and you may need to do a registry hack to actually enable it.

Look at http://www.ntfaq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=39254

[tgpo]

I had to do some magic like this too, to get my 450mgz Mac to read my 160GB HD. In the instruction book, which is only for Winblows, it says to make sure that you have the service pack. With the pack, according to the book, XP should recognize the HD perfectly with the ATA 100/133 controller card.

[Machine514]

I have service pack 1 and that regestry hack is already in the system.

How do I update the BIOS?

-Machine

[troyvcd1]

I had the exact same problem with my 120gb hd. I tried a lot of things and finally it got fixed. I am not sure what finally fixed it. You need to get the latest bios for your motherboard installed which is a pain. Go to the manufacturers website for directions.

[zodiac]

How do I update the BIOS?

go to the web site of your motherboard.it should have instructions.
look at all the bio updates and see if they say something about the limitation.if they dont say anything about it,then there is no need to flash since there is no fix.
look at all the releases.it will say what the fix of them are.the newest bios will have all the fixes,but you dont need the newest.

if you have a factory made computer like gateway,it may be harder to get info or a bios update.

make sure that you know your exact model number.flashing the wrong bios can fry your board

[troyvcd1]

When I looked up bios updates they said nothing about hard drive storage limitations. I updated my bios and I think that this is what fixed my hard drive problems. I cant hurt to update your bios. Make sure you write down all your bios settings before beginning.

[gmatov]

Machine,
Which OS are you running? You mention SP1, so is it XP? 2k is SP3, and I don't even think therte are SPs for 98 or ME.
I had the same problem with my 98SE machine. Would deduct 64 gigs, a 100 appeared as a 30+, 120, a 50+, etc. Required a new fdisk and boot disk. I don't know if this is the same with your OS, as I've done a little searching and can't find it at MS.com. (Hell, I can't find mine, either. Screwed up site.)
The new Command.com is dated about a year later in the new version. It may be that XP came out before all the super drives came out, and you may have to find the new fdisk/format tools. Someone should have them, here.
Is yours an early version of XP?

[PaulDiston]

I had the same problem with my 200 WD HDD with win 98. I had to in the end take the drive off my ide card and put it straight onto the motherboard and then I had to partion the drive into 3 x 60Gb parts. The drive was getting recongnised as only 8Gb so you are lucky to get 137Gb. If nothing else works try partioning as this should work.

[Machine514]

troyvcd1, zodiac, I am going to call Dell this afternoon to have them walk me through the BIOS update. It will probably take forever though! I'm not looking forward to that!

gmatov, I am running WinXP home edition. Not sure if it is an early version of XP.

PaulDiston, Straight to the motherboard huh? I didn't think that you could do that with a 200GB hard drive. I don't want to partition. I just don't see the need for it. I'm not bashing your setup but for example, if I want to transfer files from one partition to another it would take forever (xfering big video files anyways!). It would be like transfering from two different hard drives.

Like I said, I will try calling Dell tonight. I found all the info and updates on the Dell webpage, but I am not confident about doing this, so I will call.

Thanks all!

-Machine

[PaulDiston]

It was really the only way I could get it all to work. Win 98 has the 64Gb limit anyway so I couldn't really do it any other way. I did have the drive set up as 200Gb but my computer crashed a few times and then scan disk would not run. I had to format the drive and then it loaded ok. Bit of a work around the way I have it but I can't afford to loose things on the drive if it crashed again. I use the 3 x 60Gb drives for storage anyway so it is not that bad for transfering. I use a 60Gb drive as my c:\.

[tgpo]

Partitioning won't work unless the computer can recognize the full contents. Otherwise you'd be partitioning 137GB.

[PaulDiston]

You can download a program which can run off Floppy Disk from WD website and use that too partion. If yuo use FDISK and Format from Windows they are set to only use 64Gb or less.

[Machine514]

I tried the WD utilities disk, Data Lifeguard Tools. That didn't work. See my original post for teh results.

-Machine

[gmatov]

Machine,
If you are still having the prob, I found the new file to recognize large drives.
It's an executable from MS, to update your 98 boot disk. It worked with all my large drives, from 80 to 160 gig. Since 2k and XP both offer to convert to NTFS for you, I don't see why you can't run the modified 98 boot disk, fdisk/format, then install XP.

The file, from MS site is number 263044USA8.exe. Search by that title and you should find it. It's 176KB. If you can't find it, I could post it to you.

Personally, I never use the proprietary disk utilities. They write their own parameters to the drive, making the drive unreadable to another machine. I lost a ton of data on a WD 45 gig a few years ago. Most drives I can put in another machine when they go bad, and pull the files I want. With WD's format, Icouldn't read it. Their tech also told me it wouldn't work

BTW, don't get excited at the numbers you see with this version of fdisk. DOS seems to not see all the digits. With my 120 gig, it said total size-11700 megabytes, instead of 117000MB (the actual size of a 120), but, after I made a couple partitions, showed 97000MB to go. Your 200 should be, say, 19300, but after format, will say maybe 193 gig.

[Machine514]

gmatov,

I have not tried to fix it again (2:22PM EST here, I go home at 4:30PM).

I already have an OS installed. WinXP home. I want the 200GB hard drive as an auxilary drive.

A friend of mine said that he has a 200GB off the IDE of the motherboard. I thought that was impossible! I thought you needed a controller card for that. But I guess he has a new motherboard that supports this!

I also asked WD about this problem and they suggested an update for the Controller card drivers and BIOS. A controller card has a BIOS? I am not too familiar with the BIOS system!

-Machine

[gmatov]

Machine,
Check the Data Lifeguard CD. I know the MaxBlast CD, from my new 160 Maxtors, has ATA card drivers on it. Of course, the drives came with ATA cards, but I doubt they give different disks, with/without card.
Is yours a Promise 133?

[Machine514]

I'm actually a little embarassed to say this, but I screwed up. WinXP always installs its generic drivers. I missed that little point. WD got back to me and gave me the link on the Promise website. But it only shows 186GB. I guess that is how the file system is allocated.

Sorry all!

-Machine

PS How do you close a thread?

[gmatov]

Machine,
That's a 200 billion byte HD. Take out your calculator an multiply 1024*1024*1024*186 and you get 199.7 billion. They count in base 10, the computer counts in binary.
I was a little off. My 120 was 117, so I thought maybe 193 for yours.
Don't worry about closing the thread, if anyone is interested, or has the same prob and finds it, it might help someone else.
Just glad you got it going.