getting past the 137gb limit

[dare]

hi

according to http://www.asus.com.tw/support/engli...hdd/index.aspx the asus p4pe shd support drives over 137gb from the 1001 revision, however, i've installed the latter bios update and i still can't get above 137gb, does any1 know what might be the problem?

[Mr Steveo]

The problem is an annoying one. Its that Windows doesnt support drives over 137GB without XP Service Pack 1. And the Catch 22 is you usually need to load Windows XP onto a hard drive before you can get SP1 installed LOL

All this meaning the MS supplied IDE drivers in Windows XP dont support 48LBA / drives over 137GB. And to the best of my knowledge theres no way to load drivers for Southbrdige IDe connectors prior to loading the OS.

Suppsoedly theres one (maybe two) ways to go to make it work

1. Put the large HDD on a RAID connector or add in PCI ATA or RAID card that supports 48LBA. And be sure to load the proper drivers as soon as the OS installation begins by pressing F6

2. (This is just a rumored solution) If you slipstream Serivce Pack 1 into a new Windows XP CD, suppsoedly i ehar tell this will allow for support of large hard drives ver 137GB in Windows from the get go.

Im still a little fuzzy on the whole matter as I briefly looked into it when building a system for someone recently. My solution was to return the drive for a smaller one since the hard drive was not going on a RAID connector and I didnt wnat to mess with a PCI ATA card.

Maybe other poeple have more details they can offer you too.

[Dirck_Mun]

Originally posted by dare
hi

according to http://www.asus.com.tw/support/engli...hdd/index.aspx the asus p4pe shd support drives over 137gb from the 1001 revision, however, i've installed the latter bios update and i still can't get above 137gb, does any1 know what might be the problem?

Hi, some other information is needed. I believe others can research for and solve this problem but we need to know the
HDD maker, size and model, OS. Also did you format it first? Did the BIOS recognize it at all , what did it see?

Give some more info please, I'd be glad to help.


P4T-E user myself,
Dirck_Mun

[AHLnut]

Mr Steveo, on the "rumored" install using SP1, I can try that sometime soon and maybe confirm if it works OK I have the 200 GB WD now . I just have to make it 1 partition again and try and see. You know how I LOVE changing partitions and installing XP hehe. I hope to have time soon to do this.

[Mr Steveo]

Originally posted by AHLnut
Mr Steveo, on the "rumored" install using SP1, I can try that sometime soon and maybe confirm if it works OK I have the 200 GB WD now . I just have to make it 1 partition again and try and see. You know how I LOVE changing partitions and installing XP hehe. I hope to have time soon to do this.

Coool Id love to hear how it turns out.

I havent heard from you in weeks man! Hopefully all is well in yoru world!

[AHLnut]

All is well bud

[Sir_JaKoNT|L]

does it mean that installing SP1 will let ur HDD go beyond 137GB?

[Toasties]

I'm getting ready to build my sister a computer for video editing and she will need mucho hd space. Intend to run WinXP Pro and plan to use a WD 200GB drive in the P4PE. Or, also considering 2 WD 120GB drives with the onboard RAID 0 striping.

Three questions, will I have any issues with XP and the current bios for this board and the 137gb limit? And, when if we run 2x120GB in RAID 0 do you see 240GB? If you see 240GB in this scenario will I have any issues here with the 137GB limit?

Really appreciate the help!

Toasties

[jig]

well. slipstreaming is easy enough.

the rumor is that if you have win2k with service pack 3 and the latest drivers for the board, you can see the full partition. and i guess the same with xp.

one thing, both xp and 2k have a drive manager that can change the size of a partition on the fly, so if all else fails or you want to save some hours out of your life, just install on a smaller partition than the full 200G (why would you want to anyway) and then use the drive manager to pump it up AFTER you've installed the service pack and all else.

if you can't get the drive manager to do it, try partition magic 8.0.

in reality, you don't want one big partition. making a smallish partiton on the outer ring of the drive to put your swap file and your operating system in, and probably all your apps, will keep things nice and quick. then put all your large files/data/movies/mp3s/cdimages on the partition taking up the rest of the drive.

you can have as many partitions as you want, but only 4 bootable ones on one drive.

-jig

[Mr Steveo]

In practicality what you suggest may be true; that using partitions to keep the driver under 137GB may be a fix. But I have a theoretical and functional bug up my butt about this that makes me think thats not enough of a fix.

The problem isnt the size of the drive or partition. The problem is Windows XP pre SP1 and 2000 pre SP3 not supporting or recognizing 48LBA. Thats the logical block addressing. The LBA scheme doesnt change just because you use different partition sizes.

I suppsoe to some extent its only important that the controller driver understand the LBA (which is another can of worms I wouldnt even want to go into) But if you dont slipstream, even with smaller partitions, that doesnt change the LBA mode. So wouldnt there be problems anyways? Even if the problems are as minor as disk incosnsitencies and problems with allocation unti sizes?

I only know the stuff I posted and what Ive read from Wester Digitals site and Microsofts site. So Im still learning this stuff too. let me know what youre thoughts on these questions are. Im curious to learn more.

[jig]

well i've heard various things. one interesting comment was that the only reason to implement ata133 was because it supported 48bit addressing. but so far that doesn't seem to jibe with the fact that some people say they are able to see the full drive on an i815e chipset with the right drivers (i815e=ata100).

so, 4 total things to overcome:
1)controller has to either support or be tricked into supporting the addressing
2)bios has to be able to detect the correct size, and maybe trick the controller into being able to address everything.
3)chipset drivers used by the operating system have to be able to use/detect the space, AND might have to help with the whole trickery thing.
4)operating system has to have full support for the addressing from file system up through all the apps, and maybe something to trick apps into thinking they aren't on such a large volume. i know that there were some dos programs that wouldn't run in partitions over 500M... sigh.

when win2k came out 1,2, and 3 were all not able to address above 137G. Fat32 and ntfs were available, so there was an available filesystem, theoretically, but really that was about it. not really an incentive there for them to have it ready for primetime. i do think there were linux compilations that could handle 48bit all the way up, but since ALL the pcs then didn't support it, you're talking about running linux on some hand carved or pretty expensive hardware. apples to oranges.

really, i don't think its too much to ask that a user do this:

create a 20G partition, install whichever opertaing system they want into it with all the trimmings, then use disk manager to expand the partition out to encompass the whole disk, if they really want to. OR, they could try the slipstreaming, OR they could buy or order the slipstreamed disk from MS direct.

as far as problems go, if you don't install what you need to see the whole drive and get cut off at 137G or whatever, you still make a partition that is clearly defined in the 137 available space and there won't be any problems. chunks of data aren't going to migrate into the unadressable space, there's basically a hard wall there.

someone mentioned striping 2 120G drives. a friend just striped 2 80Gs and was able to measure a very positive effect, but only when each drive has it's own channel (can't be on the same cable). except for the fact that you are relying on the integrity of 2 drives at all times rather than 1, it sounds nice.

i am thinking hard about getting 2 of the 200s. fortunately, you get a controller card with the drives so i can have plenty of room to stripe and keep my other drives AND have a couple burners.

now that i think of it, its a little hard to rationalize all that... sigh.


oh, and for the reason why LBA wasn't just LBA is LBA is LBA. my guess is that when they wrote all the disk access stuff, they optimized everything up to the available hardware limitations, which was less than 48bits. why use a variable that eats up 48bits of memory when 99.9999% of the time (then) when you can get away with 40 bits or whatever. i want to say its 32bits, especially since all the processors we have now on pcs are only 32bit, but 137GB i think works out to 40bit addressing.
at least we're good up till 35TB or so.

for more info on the LBA stuff, go here:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/modesLBA-c.html

and read through some of the links. it is pretty informative.

[JoeFrat]

well i've heard various things. one interesting comment was that the only reason to implement ata133 was because it supported 48bit addressing. but so far that doesn't seem to jibe with the fact that some people say they are able to see the full drive on an i815e chipset with the right drivers (i815e=ata100).

The proof of this is here:
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_d...e_barriers.htm

"The ATA Interface Limit (128 GiB / 137 GB) Barrier

In order to avoid previous disk barriers and limitations, other than those imposed by the operating systems themselves, today's hard drives no longer rely upon discrete geometry (specific cylinder, head and sector numbers) and instead use logical block addressing and a sector number. Unfortunately, even when we move away from bit addressing in favor of head and sector numbers, we still reach the limit of our ability to address all of the bits when taken together. Let's take a look at the ATA interface. There are 28 bits used for the sector number interface with the operating system, BIOS and the hard disk. This means a hard disk can have a maximum of 2^28 or 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes, placing the ATA interface maximum at 128 GiB or approximately 137.4 GB.

As little as one or two years ago, no one thought there would be hard drives exceeding 137.4 GB. However, as many of you have seen, hard drive capacity surpassed this mark when Maxtor released their DiamondMax Plus 540X at 160 GB on October 29, 2001. Of course, Maxtor's release of a drive at 160 GB caught many techno-geeks off guard. How could they possibly make these huge drives work? Maxtor considered the 137 GB barrier well before releasing the drive as part of an entirely new initiative to take storage capacities into the petabyte region. To conquer the 137GB barrier, when Maxtor released their new drive, they made a new Ultra ATA/133 PCI adapter card available as part of the package. Believe it or not, for a limited period, the add-in card was "free". The adapter itself, however, was Maxtor's method of bringing these new drives to market and in the process temporarily solving the barrier problem without requiring users to purchase new computers to handle the new technology.

Significant changes have occurred to the ATA interface between the hard disk and the rest of the computer system in less than a year, and more are in the making. One entity charged with the responsibility of developing the new standards for this interface (and its changes) is Technical Committee T13. It is responsible for the coordination and development of all interface standards relating to the popular AT Attachment (ATA) storage interface utilized on most personal and mobile computers today. A few years ago a number of different proposals to expand ATA addressing from 28 bits to either 48 or 64 bits were made, and over those few years the committee examined each very closely. Either of these technology changes would permit huge drive sizes. The first to surface, however, was 48 bit addressing and delivered in the form of a hard drive at 160 GB by Maxtor. Using 48-bits like Maxtor takes drive sizes 100,000 times higher than current limits. This is most definitely a signal of what lies ahead!

Solution:

Due to BIOS limitations as well as those unique to Windows®, partitioning and formatting drives larger than 137 Gigabytes without proper driver or controller support will result in data loss when storing data to the drive beyond the 137 GB Barrier.

In order for you system to recognize more than 137 GB you will need to utilize one of the following recommended solutions:

1. If you have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset (810, 810E, 810E2, 815, 815, 815E, 815EP, 815P, 820, 820E, 830M, 830MP, 830MG, 840, 845, 850, or 860) please visit Intel's web site and download the Intel Application Accelerator. Intel's Application Accelerator supports the full capacity of drives larger than 137 GB.
2. If you do not have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset then it is recommended that you purchase an Ultra ATA 133 PCI card that supports 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA). You can purchase the Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI Card, which supports drives that are larger than 137 GB, directly from us or your local distributor.

If you do not follow either of the above steps, and you attempt to use a drive that exceeds 137 GB and/or that relies on 48-bit Logical Block Addressing by attempting to "tweak" the system even though your ATA controller, chipset drivers and/or system BIOS do not properly support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing, data loss will occur when storing data to the drive beyond the barrier."

[JoeFrat]

Originally posted by Sir_JaKoNT|L
does it mean that installing SP1 will let ur HDD go beyond 137GB?

According to this MS KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q303013
Yes but you have to edit the registry to do so.
From the KB:
"By default 48-bit LBA ATAPI support on Windows XP Home Edition and Professional is unavailable. Users must add the registry key mentioned earlier to make this addressing available to access disk space beyond the first 137GB. Data corruption can occur if previous versions of Windows that do not support 48-bit LBA out of the box (for example, Windows 2000 or earlier) are installed on a disk partition that was previously created by a 48-bit aware operating system such as Windows XP that is greater in size or spans the current addressable limit of 137GB. NOTE: This includes Windows XP RTM versions. By default, the behavior does not occur in Windows XP RTM. Also note that if you manually turn on 48-bit LBA support on Windows XP without Service Pack 1 installed, you may cause data loss.

To enable 48-bit LBA large-disk support in the registry:

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Locate and click the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\
3. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:

Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0x1
4. Quit Registry Editor."

[AHLnut]

Geez I just typed a "novel" reply in here and when I went to send it, my hand hit the "extra" "back" mouse button on the side and I lost it all DOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Who put that button there!!!!!!!!!! ARRGGGGGGG
Anyway, in short Mr Steveo, I did a non-slipstreamed XP Pro installation and as we know, it DID NOT recognize the full 200 GB WD drive.
I then installed XP with SP1 slipstreamed into it and it DID recognize the FULL drive. So what you heard has been confirmed. That a slipstreamed SP1 install DOES support LBA48.

A little off topic, does anyone know how to slipstream the XP updates released AFTER SP1 onto a XP installation disk?