Win 2000 harddisk size limits?

I'm repairing a computer for my lodge, one I had built a while back. The old hard drive died, a 100 Gig. I found a Maxtor ATA 7200RPM 200 Gig on sale and am trying to install that using their installation disk. I am being told that I have a 131Gig partition formating as I speak. I was kinda hopping for the full 200 Gig. My boy has the same MB and was able to format to 200 Gig with his setup on XP. Is this a Win2000 limitation, or what?

If not how do I get around it, use a Maxtor disk mangler?

Thanks.

 

Get the latest Win 2000 service pack. It will update the atapi.sys driver, so it can utilize all the space.

 

So I'm booting this from the CD (which has SP4), it didn't ask about the disk size at all. To be honest, I don't have a clue, I've just been going with the flow and answering the questions as the CD presents them. It is assuming NTFS, which is fine by me, but it is also assuming the drive size.

Since it never offers options, and makes all the assumtions, I kinda figure I might not have any choice in the matter. Don't hurt to ask the questions though. It was pretty much the same with the XP installation.

 

Oooh...

If you have sp4 on CD, and it still sees onyl 131gb, on a brand new drive...there is a very good chance your BIOS isnt up to date, or cannot support 48 bit LBA. Check on a BIOS update.

 

OK, thanks. While I have the same motherboard in many computers I'm sure there are a lot of revisions in the BIOS, since I've bought them from many places over a wide area of time.

 

Win2000 has a built-in HD size limit of +/- 132gb (as did WinXP pre-SP1). What I've done in the past was to let Win2000 format the drive and install the OS as a 131gb HD, then using a partition resizer (like BootIT-NG), I would resize the partition to it's maximum size; in your case 200gb. A pain in the butt, yet it works like a charm

hopperdave2000

BTW- don't install any software or drivers before doing the partition resize just in case things go haywire....

 

Remedied in the service packs...that limitation no longer exists.

 

Just out of curiosity, where do you get BootIT-NG?

The other question is how do you know it isn't corrupting the disk?

I did something similar with Win98Se, thought everything was cool, then found out I was being stupid, just because it seems to work didn't mean it was working. Data written past the 137G 98 limit (on the upper part of the drive) was mirrored on the lower part of the drive, with disastorous results.

Rather than fight this issue (although I will play with it) I'll see if I can get a 120 Gig disk drive.

But on a separate level, how do you test the real data integrity of a drive that has been oversized (by whatever means)? I've never heard of such a test, would have been a lifesaver before I setup several Win98SE machines with a 160+Gig disks. I'm still banging my head on the desk on that one. On my personal computer I partitioned my 160Gig drive down to 135Gig, and disreguarded the rest (which was almost painful for a data packrat like me).

 

OK, found the latest version of DiskIT on MG, and tried it out (side note, it burned its own bootable CD on a computer with no drivers installed, starting from a 750K zipped file, neat!). It enlarged the partition as advertised, if there is some way of insuring that it's not smoke and mirrors I may go with it, the last thing I want is to explain why I have to format this computer again sometime down the road.

Thanks for the help so far.

 

Just a quick update, I've reinstalled the OS several more times since my last post, it now formats the disk to the new size while refering to the old one. Go figure.