Huge hard drive under WinXP

[Matt_H]

I'm trying to help a friend get a 300GB SATA hard drive formatted on his PC.

Windows (booted from another drive) detects the drive as being connected in the hardware manager, but it doesn't show up in My Computer to be formatted.

Booting from the XP CD shows only ~137GB on the drive that can be formatted. Obviously, it's hitting the small LBA block. I am reasonably certain, however, that the BIOS properly detects it as a 300GB drive.

SP2 has been installed, so shouldn't this be working? I've found instructions on how to manually enable the 48bit LBA for ATAPI devices, but not SATA devices. Or is it the same process?

Any advice appreciated.

[Matt_H]

by countzero on 2005/5/14 3:06:49

IMHO you should partition it first using control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management

That did it! Thanks!