win Xp and its 32Gb fixation!

Baron Floyd

Hi everyone, long time lurker first time poster,

My issue which I'm hoping is a simple one is this: I recently bought a 200GB HD to replace my old 30GB one that was dead. Removed the old one and installed the new one, then went to run Windows Xp Pro install. when it went looking for a partition to install the OS on it could only find 32GB of unpartitioned space. I fired on and created a 32GB C: partition, assuming that once I'd installed service pack 2 and run the disc manager I could recover the lost space...this turned out to be not the case, even disc manager will only find 32GB on my 200GB disc....what am I doing wrong?

ssh

Ouch... that's not a Windows XP problem. It sounds like your BIOS isn't reporting the size of the drive correctly. No amount of windows fiddling will sort this. Go into the BIOS and tell it to redetect the drive on the correct controller. Failing that, try flashing it up to the newest version.

Goodshape

MS Disc Manager is fairly crap. Have a google for some better disc management software and you'll probably get more options.

Partition Magic is quite good.

Sherifu

what format?

microsoft.com wrote:

NOTE: Microsoft Windows 2000 only supports FAT32 partitions up to a size of 32 GB.

XP is probably similar...
Linky

I'd guess use ntfs to format the disk.

FAT32 due to 32Gig limit I guess.
Fat32 by name, Fat32 by nature...

Standard Toaster

Deffo a BIOS/mobo issue. WinXP install should still report the size of the drive correctly regardless if it's formatted or not. Your right about XP only formatting upto 32Gb using FAT32 though...use a win98 boot disc if you have too or format with NTFS.

O/P
Try and get a BIOS update for you mobo like ssh said or as a last resort get a PCI IDE controller which you can plug the hdd into thus bypassing the mobo chipset limitation.
Good luck.

Baron Floyd

Sorry i should have specified, it is NTFS formatted, I reckon your right about the BIOS, been fiddling for hours now and no luck, even took the disc out to have a read of the label I'm going to try Partition Magic now and see whats what, Tnks All

maxheadroom

amatheum wrote:

Sorry i should have specified, it is NTFS formatted, I reckon your right about the BIOS, been fiddling for hours now and no luck, even took the disc out to have a read of the label I'm going to try Partition Magic now and see whats what, Tnks All

Is this link any use: http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/capacity/32_338/index.html ?

Baron Floyd

partition magic didn't work out, something seriously wrong here. plus its an 'orrible dell system so I'm going to have to go searching their site for the BIOS update :mad:

Baron Floyd

about to loose the rag with dell, their handy service tag look up is broken, so i have no clue who makes their poxy unbranded parts :mad: :mad:

*sign* rant over. will try to get through to them tomorrow to get the BIOS update, unless any Uber-tech knows another way to find out who makes the mother board?

EL WOG

the only thing i can recommend first, is look up the part no. of you new drive
on the net, and find out its details, like No. of heads ect. you should be able to enter this manually in your bios and verify that is 200g in the first place

Standard Toaster

amatheum, go onto your bios and post the bios ID....will be a long string of numbers/digits.
FTP access for Dell bioses here:
ftp://ftp.euro.dell.com/bios

If you do try and update her just make sure you read any docs that come with the download, twice.

maxheadroom

try seagate discwizard - it should be able to write a DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) which should get you over the 32GB humb without needing a bios update

GerardKeating

The_Edge wrote:

Your right about XP only formatting upto 32Gb using FAT32 though...

not correct, i have a 120GB FAT32 partition,

Standard Toaster

GerardKeating wrote:

not correct, i have a 120GB FAT32 partition,

Yes, I have a 250Gb hdd running here in XP using FAT32. It's a portable hdd.
The fact is if I attampt to format this in XP it will only format it upto 32Gb.

Quick google....see here, here, here, here oh and here

XDA

Most large drives have a jumper setting that "limits size to 32GB". Many of them ship with this as the default setting for some strange reason, so I suspect that you have this jumper on. Remove it and try again, all should then be ok.

It'll be at the back of the drive between the IDE connector and the power connector. There should be a diagram on the disk showing the various jumper settings.

XDA

humaxf1

could be to do with LBA 48 bit setting in the registry...or the lack of it. WinXP should recognise upto 137GB under NTFS...FAT32 should not be used for WinXP

astrofool

go to http://support.euro.dell.com/ie/en/home.asp

enter your system model, and/or its service tag.

Go to downloads, choose flashbios, download the latest one.

Run the file, make the floppy, put it in the machine, make sure it boots from floppy, say yes when it asks you to.

Reboot the machine, retry the windows XP setup, and it should now show up with a disk of size ~200gb, or at worst ~137gb. If not your machine probably cannot support large disks, as many old dell's could not.

You should not have to ring dell, it is a dell made motherboard, they have all the bios files on their website. It is nothing to do with 48bit lba, when you partition in XP, it is nothing to do with fat32 or ntfs, THAT OPTION COMES UP AFTER ITS BEEN PARTITIONED TO 200gb.

If you then have a 137gb problem, you need to install from an xpsp2 cd, and/or slipstream your current XP cd to xpsp2, which involves a few other steps and a cd burner.

gobby

XDA wrote:

Most large drives have a jumper setting that "limits size to 32GB". Many of them ship with this as the default setting for some strange reason, so I suspect that you have this jumper on. Remove it and try again, all should then be ok.

It'll be at the back of the drive between the IDE connector and the power connector. There should be a diagram on the disk showing the various jumper settings.

XDA

Definitly check this. Did this once myself. Theres no software that can fix it! I was going nuts. Man, I felt like a plum when it was noticed!

"Hey, why does this say 32GB cap?", followed by lots of laughing.

/edit: For me it was set where the pins for secondary/master were. I had the jumper on where I thought was the secondary setting. To set for secondary the jumper actually had to be off/disconnected.

Spunog UIE

gobby wrote:

Definitly check this. Did this once myself. Theres no software that can fix it! I was going nuts. Man, I felt like a plum when it was noticed!

thats crazy, i've bought loads of harddrives over the years over 32gigs, that has never been the case with any of them. I say if it did happen, it would take me ages to cop on to it. Stupid thing for any company to do.

Baron Floyd

XDA wrote:

Most large drives have a jumper setting that "limits size to 32GB". Many of them ship with this as the default setting for some strange reason, so I suspect that you have this jumper on. Remove it and try again, all should then be ok.

It'll be at the back of the drive between the IDE connector and the power connector. There should be a diagram on the disk showing the various jumper settings.

XDA

I reckon thats gotta be it, onto a mate in dell today and he gave me the latest BIOS update, still only registering 32 Gig. about to tear the box apart with bare hands, will update if i manage to restrain myself from stamping it to little bits.

Baron Floyd

Thank you all for your insight and tech-wisdom, especially XDA, it turns out the brains at seagate saw fit to mess with my head and had the 32Gb jumper set on the disc. Anyway all is well now, 3 nice big 50GB partitions formatting now and I'm off to get quite drunk.

See ya later

SickBoy

The_Edge wrote:

Yes, I have a 250Gb hdd running here in XP using FAT32. It's a portable hdd.
The fact is if I attampt to format this in XP it will only format it upto 32Gb.

Quick google....see here, here, here, here oh and here

How did you create the 250Gb FAT32 partition? All those links you posted state 120Gb is the max...

Inspector Gadget

The maximum size of a FAT32 partition is 4TB (yes, terabytes), though why you'd _want_ a 4TB FAT32 partition is frankly beyond me

I believe the Windows installer tops out at 32GB for formatting FAT32 partitions; I'm not sure about the Disk Management tools that come with 2k/XP (I don't use FAT32 if I can help it), but if you go with a third-party partition management tool (Partition Magic, or a free one) you should be able to create any size of FAT32 partition you want (current disk sizes withstanding)...

Gadget