Hi
I am looking at installing a bigger HDD and thinking i might move away from IDE or Eide and go the way of the SATA or Serial drive
my question is
What is the Maxim drive capacity would windows Xp Pro and the Elite Group PT800CE-A board will support up to?
because the new drives are already on the market from 350 G/b to 1 T/b
thank you for any input to this question.
KG4OHH @ Hotmail . com
On the net there are systems usig the EliteGroup (ECS) PT800CE-A with a 300GB HDD (here). If you are running windows xp with SP1 or greater, your technical limitation is 2.2TB (2200GB) due to the addressing limitatons in the 32 bit Opeating system. If you are using Windows XP 64Bit Edition, you have a maximum theoretical size of 144PB (144000TB) though this may not be achievable.
The BIOS may not be able to address quite this much space, and the IDE or SATA controller may have its own Addressing Limitation. The newer your hardware is, the less likely you are to have issues with large sized drivers.
For the Motherboard BIOS, the only way to extend it to seeing more of the HDD you need to upgrade the BIOS (Firmware Update). These updates can usually be downloaded off the Motherboard Vendors website.
The 128GB limit may be due to formating as a FAT32 Partition. If you want extra space you need to format as NTFS. FAT32 only handles up to 128GB.
Windows XP Should already have enabled large drive support, but you may want to check up on this Microsoft KB article about Big LBA for drive access in Windows 2000. It was relevant to Windows XP prior to Service Pack 1, but for some reason the Reg Key may not be set correctly.
Judging that it is a 128GB limit (not a 137GB) I would be more inclined to think that your BIOS is not supporting the large drive. Definitely try and find a BIOS update for your board first. Be careful to follow the instructions on updating this VERY carefully, as you may make your Motherboard unusable if you do it wrong (or use the wrong firmware).
Good Luck.
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tnx for the reply, sorry i forgot to add some soft/hardware info:
O/S is windows Xp pro, with service pack 2 and all up to date with the updates.
Hardware:
Pt800CE-A motherboard, AGP (8x) Visiontek 9200Se with 256mb onboard ram dac, 2X80gb Eide hdd's, EIDE LG DvD Light scribe drive and Eide Cd//W Drive, Linksys 54g wifi (pci)
2Gb of Crosair xms ram matched pair 3200 @ 400mhz, P4 2.40ghz Cpu, 380 PSU (power supply unit), 5 fans.
Question:
if for some reasion windows xp pro or the M/board bios, limits a drive from 250Gb or more, so its only seeing 128gb, how would i over come this issue ?
thank you
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