Does Size Matter?

[jimmyd]

Hello. I'm a newbie, so have patience. Found this site looking for help on-line.
Trying to add a Seagate 400 gig hard drive in a computer running 2000 pro. Intel board with a p4. Need larger drive to store video.
Cannot get it to work; tried as single, as a master, and as a slave with another drive as the master. When I try to format, it only will recognize it as 130 gig. I rechecked updates on the MS site.
Is there a size limit with 2000 pro? If so what is it?
What about xp pro?
Thanks.

[bubba]

Who made the drive?

Most have setup software the you can download and run that enable the large drive support.

[Zelig]

It's a known issue.

http://www.48bitlba.com/win2k.htm

The link there probably does a better job explaining than I could, feel free to post back if you have any questions.

[DMB2000uk]

You can use this program off of a liveCD to resize your partitions:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Dan

[jimmyd]

Thanks for the replies. Printed off the 48 bit lda link. I'll have to read it a few more times. This is only a "known" problem to those that are "in the know". I know just enuf about computers to be dangerous. I've had to reformat many times to fix one of my fixes.

Last night I slaved the 400 gig hd to another computer that has xp, and it formatted ok out to 390 something. So it's definately a software issue, 2000 limitation. May be time to go xp on all my computers. Just not a good time to spend the $$ to upgrade from 2000 to xp. Between me and the kids, that's 5 computers.
Thanks again.

[Cannyone]

Well, I know this isn't the answer you want to hear, but you may need to get into BIOS (stands for Basic Input/Output System and is encoded into a chip on your motherboard). Once there you need to figure out which page has the drive information (though it may start up to that page - depending on the brand of BIOS). And you need to Enable LBA (Large Block Addressing) for that drive.

Oh, the most frequent way to enter BIOS is by hitting the "Delete" key a few times, right after you hear a beep on start up. However, this will be different if it's a Dell, or some such proprietary brand.

[jimmyd]

I am familiar with entering the bios, but did not know about the LBA enable. Will try that first. Am trying to find a way to go xp, which will support larger drives, on all my computers. Starting to run into limitations with 2000.
Thanks for the reply.