How Do You Break the 131GByte Barrier

[SLK001]

I am trying to install two new 160GB harddrives, but Windows only sees 131GB. Is there any way to get the OS to see the extra 30GB without any external programs (like Partition Magic, etc.)?

[stiltman]

Check to see if you have the latest BIOS update for your motherboard. Looking at your comp specs, you have win2k with sp4, which supports larger hard drives.

:edit: Make sure you don't have Intels application accelerater installed. Us win2ks builtin IDE controls...I know I had a problem with that when I upgraded my HDDs

[SLK001]

Correct. Turns out you need to add a registry setting to enable 48 bit LBA addressing. Going to give it a try tonight.

[mujahid7ia]

What company HDDs? My WDs came with software to enable the 160GBs on my HD. If the BIOS is new, it'll recognize it w/o extra software.

[flaninacupboard]

what is wrong with the people who design filesystems?! seems like every five minutes there's a new capacity limitation that can't be overcome.

[Faustus]

There is a problem? my 180gb installed without a hitch without me doing a thing. Must mean MS already patched it cause I tend to stay up to date.

[Solarjetman]

what is wrong with the people who design filesystems?! seems like every five minutes there's a new capacity limitation that can't be overcome.

Really there is not much you can do to get away from size limitations. As you probably know, hard drives are seperated into sectors. The hard drive refers to a certian sector when retrieving data. The normal size of one sector is 512 bytes. In other words, a hard drive must return data in multiples of 512 bytes whether the full secot is used for data or not.

The limitation comes in when you try and number sectors for identification. Computers need that in binary but can only handle a certian number of digits in it. The ATA/100 used 28-bit addressing. In other words, the ATA controller was only smart enough to count up to 2^28 or 268,435,456. Thus there was a limit of 2^28 x 512byte = 137GB.

The ATA/133 standard uped the addressing to 48 bits. So its limit is 2^48 x512 bytes = 144PB (no typo, that is PetaBytes). many many times larger than the limit of ATA/100.

Of course then you have to make sure the OS handles it and throw in concerns about making sure the drives will work in older systems. But the bottom line is there will always be a highest value the computer can "count" to and thus a size limit. But the more changes you make, the less compatibility with old systems. Its a give and take situtaion so comprimises have to be made.

[mujahid7ia]

There is a problem? my 180gb installed without a hitch without me doing a thing. Must mean MS already patched it cause I tend to stay up to date.

Also means you had BIOS support for large hard drives.

[flaninacupboard]

It just seems stupd that way back when people discovered their new 550mb drive didn't work that they didn't think ahead. maybe 120gigs was considered a ridiculous amount of storage that no human would ever need at the time

[SLK001]

Windows 2000P has had 48 bit addressing available since SP3 (at least). However, it has to be enabled by a registry entry. Once enabled, it recognized all the drive.

Don't know why this setting isn't standard, but it might be that the extra overhead slows down the system slightly.

Now, if I could only find a way to get my CD-ROMs to spin up faster in W2kP (takes them about 10 seconds after disk insertion to start spinning).