My problem is as follows:
1. I bought a 1st Gen. Serial ATA Western Digital Caviar (7200rpm) with a capacity of 250GB to home into my system build [I won't bore with the rest of the set-up, unless anybody needs the extra information?]
2. The BIOS shows the drive as 250GB.
3. Windows XP Professional only recognises 127GB of the hard drive, even with SP1 installed.
4. Diskmgmt.msc shows a healthy system of 127.99 GB with no available unpartitioned spaces.
5. Western Digital provide a partitioning tool together with a Knowledge Base Article [ http://wdc.custhelp....h...bA**&p_li=# ]. As I can understand, this can only be used on an unformatted drive. This would not be a huge problem were it not for the fact that it is the only HD in my system and I would prefer not to have to reformat. The other worry for me is that in step 7 of the Western Digital Knowledge Base Article, the following question is asked: "[Are you] certain system supports drives larger than 137 GB?". I'm not sure whether by 'system' they are referring to the BIOS [in which case good, as I know the BIOS is happy with the drive] or the operating system [in which case I would imagine to be bad since my operating system would not yet be installed and so neither would SP1 - would this not cause an issue?]
6. I have looked at Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 303013 [How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP], but as I have been awake for the past three days, my brain will just not work [please excuse any stray typos I may have made], so I do not want to attempt anything until I know for sure I have understood their advice correctly.
_____6.1 So this is how my caffeine fuelled brain understands Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 303013:
_____Requirements:
__________6.1.1 Atapi.sys needs to be version 5.1.2600.1135, so I have downloaded the hotfix provided in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 331958.
__________6.1.2 A 48-bit LBA-compatible BIOS - am I to assume that since my hard drive is recognised as 250GB in the BIOS that this is the case?
__________6.1.3 Hard Disk exceeding 137GB - Hmm, yes the root of my problems [I should've just bought 2x100GB drives instead].
__________6.1.4 Windoes XP SP1 - Installed 21/03/2006.
_____6.2 Then, the instructions on Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 303013 advise that to enable 48-bit LBA support by using an unattended installation with the Microsoft System Preparation (Sysprep) tool, I have to follow certain steps [I'm sure I'll follow these when awake - although if any additional advice could be provided I would be most grateful].
_____6.3 If I follow the Microsoft procedure, will I have 2 partitions to the drive [I would much prefer to have just the one].
My question is, considering the problems I outlined above, should I follow procedure in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 303013 or should I reformat my hard drive and use the manufacturer provided partitioning utility?
Sorry for the wordy post. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks for your time in reading this.
Edited by Hamelia, 21 March 2006 - 08:48 PM.
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