| Windows 137GB Capacity Barrier |
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| Written by Phill Hardstaff | |||
| Monday, 01 January 2007 17:50 | |||
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Just to save anyone else the headache I went through trying to work out what was going on with this when I tried to install a 160Gb SATA drive in my home PC. I had seen this problem a few times at work but found a way around it, i.e. what happens is you connect a SATA drive (or IDE for that matter ) that is larger than 137Gb, lets say 160Gb for example, and no matter what you do when you go to install Windows XP it shows up as a 137Gb drive with a free space of 131,073mb and allowing you to only create a partition of 131,069mb and no matter what you do this is all you can do. OK, first thing to realize is that this is a Windows limitation, specifically Windows XP as was first released with no service packs. For a really good explanation of this see here http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pdf
So, what to do. The easiest way around this is to install a version of XP that already has at LEAST service pack one applied to it, using XP service pack one or two will show the correct drive size and this problem has been fixed. If you are trying to install from an original release CD then you will always have the problem above. In that case you would have to find an SP1 or SP2 CD or try to update your CD to SP2, I found a few ways to do that on the internet fairly easily. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1626 http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm If you cannot do that and you are stuck with your original XP CD there is another way around this. This is for SATA drives only, but it depends on your BIOS, if you are stuck a really shitty one like in my ASUS P5L 1394 then you are up the creek without a paddle. Most motherboards by default will make SATA drives appear as PATA drives drives to the O/S but any half decent motherboard will allow you to have the SATA drives run as drives connected to the SATA controller but not emulating PATA / ATAPI drives (mine does not) If you can do this, and create a driver floppy for the SATA controller, the start the Windows install CD and press F6 at the start, add drives for your controller and you will get around the above limitation, I have used this method with both Intel and Uli SATA controllers.
You will also strike this
problem if you add a large drive to a system running XP with no service packs
applied, you can still create and use the drive but with a max partition size
of 130Mb, and beware though, if you update to SP1 or 2 you are going to have
problems, update before adding the drive.
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