My New Hard Drive

[loco diablo]

I know this is completely different from what other people write on here but I can't find any computing hardware forums anywhere, plus i've seen that quite a lot of people know a lot about computers.

I bought a new 200 GB W/Digital Hard drive and it arrived today... anyway, I have been told some motherboards will not recognise it, will it damage the hard drive if i install it, FDisk it and just use it if it only comes up as 138 or something like that?

So basically if i bought a new motherboard it'll go up to a 200 G/B?

[loco diablo]

Looking in to it, i can't find the FDisk tool within my Windows XP (Pro)

How do I install a new hard drive??

[Dennis1968]

Ask who ever you got the drive from, WHY under what situations? that is new to me. many motherboards with see the drive but maybe not the full size.

Plug the hard drive to an available IDE slot and power cord. reboot into XP. it will see the new drive. in MY computer you should see the 200 gig as a different drive letter. right click it and select format. that is the easiest way.

Unless something changed, you can still use a portion of if you format it. just like the old days when Motheboardss were locked at 540meg and bigger hard drives were out there,. once you format it, what you see is what you can use unless you can a hold of a PCI IDE UDMA 133 card and can boot to a SCSI device.. the only dama=ge that will happen is if you have critical data on the drive and you later decide to format to a full 200 gigs.

[IJM]

...it only comes up as 138 or something like that?

Hi,

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt!

You'll be relieved to hear that you can put your wallet away, you shouldn't need a new motherboard. Your message said "138 or something like that". Well, 137 "metric" Gigabytes is equal to 128 "computer" Gigabytes - a suspiciously round number!

It sounds like a visit to Microsoft is in order. The original Windows XP does not recognise drives over 128Gb. Instead it just tells you that its 128Gb big. However, XP Service Pack 1 overcomes this limitation.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

[mkelley]

Actually, it's a limitation of most ATA connections on the motherboard to only see 128gb. You can get an Ultra ATA card to overcome this limitation. The cards support 48-bit logical block addressing so it supports drives bigger than 137GB.

So your drive isn't worthless -- you can't use some of the space on it unless you get a new ATA card, but so what? Either get a new card or just use what you can until you get your next computer which *will* use the full drive space.

[IJM]

Actually, it's a limitation of most ATA connections on the motherboard to only see 128gb. You can get an Ultra ATA card to overcome this limitation. The cards support 48-bit logical block addressing so it supports drives bigger than 137GB.

So your drive isn't worthless -- you can't use some of the space on it unless you get a new ATA card, but so what? Either get a new card or just use what you can until you get your next computer which *will* use the full drive space.

We're both right. It's all here in Microsoft article 303013.

So, it looks like that means you should upgrade your BIOS to the latest available version and upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 1.

Only if that doesn't work, would it be time to look at upgrading your hardware.

Ian.

[poopyhead]

the HDD size limitation by older mobos is why most hdd that are bigger than 120 GB also come with an ultra ATA133 controller card...that will recognize the bigger hdd.

[mkelley]

Ah... you're right. I was thinking about last year, when I watched the Screen Savers try and put together a terabyte of storage using 160gb drives (with custom cards). I keep forgetting how fast technology changes.

Mea culpa -- hard for this old man to keep up.

[gmatov]

poopyhead,
I was out this past weekend looking to see if any were on sale, and don't recall seeing ANY, other than the ones (160 gig) I bought a few weeks ago, that come with an ATA card. They don't give 'em away, as a rule.

I'm not sure that works, for sure, anyway, as I fdisked, formatted one 8 gig OS, balance video work space, and when I put it in another 'puter to transfer some files, they were garbled. That partition shows as 144 gig.

This sys is Win98SE, with the updated fdisk, which does format over 64 gigs.

But, if my 144 gig P is not writeable, am going to have to do it over as 15+ and the balance, less than 137.

Does that sound plausible?

Cheers,

George

ps;should have this on the W2k machine anyway.

[poopyhead]

@gmatov,

really?

most of the Maxtor ones have ATA cards...as well as WD drives

[gmatov]

poopyhead,

No, most of them did not have cards packed with them. As a matter of fact, I would not buy one without, as I do build a few computers for friends, and I would rather give them 'puters with the card, than without. I do consider it rather important. WD, even tho' a division of Maxtor, usually doesn't.

[poopyhead]

weird then.....all the Maxtor and WD deals i've seen all come with ata cards

that's one of the reasons that made the 160 gig maxtor 8 mb cache 7200 rpm + ATA 133 RAID controller card for $80 so great...

the card may be as much as $30-$50 normally..

[rallynavvie]

The blister pack WD HDD had an ATA133 controller, not a RAID controller. Unless they were referring to software striping. I saw a lot of those come and go. RAID is useless to make faster drives, but useful for mirroring files. I used to have a pair of 80GB drives striped on a RAID controller (which I bought for $20 new) and it still wasn't good enough so now my RAID controller is just an ATA card. I got two fast-as-hell SCSI drives for my quick drives now. The 2 WD 200GB drives I purchased were bare so they were completely unformatted and therefor didn't even show up in Explorer. I had to go into disk management to see them. I've heard of system board limitations for big HDDs but most boards that support ATA133 should be able to see larger drives with a BIOS update. And if you have a legit version of WinXP Pro you really need SP1. My WinXP Pro CD came with SP1 on it, dunno if yours did or not.

[EddyH]

what the hey? XP can't recognise >128Gb / 137gb? how come my windows 98 has no problem with a 180gb drive then? microsoft, they so kerrayzee..

the motherboard, however... not so happy. had to buy a RAID ("ATA133") card to make it work at full capacity. running it for a week or so with a 128Gb partition didn't seem to harm it though, just partitionmagic'd it down to 100Gb when the card was in and made the rest of the space into a second logical drive. since then, smooth and easy.

(gee.. that cost me 169 last autumn.. now 180's go for about 110, 200s for 130, and 250s for 189.. a sudden rush has come on, time to invest in serial ATA methinks)