500gb ide hard drive - need specific ide controller?

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chris501's picture
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500gb ide hard drive - need specific ide controller?

hi there!

it seems like my friends have too much money - at the moment they are buying stuff like it was as cheap as a can of beer.

but now the real topic of this post: a friend of mine has bought a 500gb ide hard drive for his pc. when he connects it to his mainboard, windows 2000 is only able to see 128gb, not more not less. he's got a 2 year old machine with a p4vm8 mainboard manufactured by asrock. according to the asrock homepage, it supports ata133 drives. the cable is a certified ata133 cable with 80 wires. also, i don't think that there is a limitation of hard drive sizes in win2k. so it should work, but it doesn't...

do i need a special ide controller for this drive?

any other suggestions?

Dr. Webster's picture
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Does the motherboard report t

Does the motherboard report the full capacity of the drive? If so, then Win2k is the problem (not sure why he'd be running 2k on a 2-year-old machine anyway).

chris501's picture
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yes...

the motherboard reports the full capacity in it's bios, but i thought that doesnt necessarely mean that the motherboard can handle it? i thought it only get's that info from the drive (as a string or something from the drive rom or so?), but doesnt actually do something with/about it.

btw, he is running win2k because he needs it for his print server software.

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should work

but not if yer running win2k sp2 or earlier, see this Micro$oft KB article, which info I found instantly with this Google search.

Being ATA133 isn't the issue, but a two-year-old logic board ought to be 48-bit LBA capable, that is, able to see drives larger than 137GB.

dan k

chris501's picture
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it is windows 2k with sp4

it is windows 2k with sp4. but as stated in the micro$oft article you referred to, you still need to create the "EnableBigLBA" registry key by hand, even with windows 2k sp3 or sp4. so maybe that could be the issue? i'll try that one and let you know...

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Windows 2k Most likely the problem

I had the same problem with my 200GB and windows 2k. It wouldn't recognize the full drive, unless i used the software with the drive. Otherwise, it would only see the first 128GB of the drive.

It wasn't till XP that they finally got the larger size working. Although, I heard that XP or Server 2003 doesn't support anything larger than 1TB, so doing server configs is like pulling teeth. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

chris501's picture
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yes, it works!

i was using the hint which dankephoto posted: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=305098
finally, it works! also the small program which could be found in http://www.48bitlba.com/enablebiglbatool.htm was very helpful.

thanks a lot guys! you saved my day! Smile

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