This one was fun. To install a hard drive larger than 137 gigabytes on your computer you need the following:

a motherboard, such as the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 which support the 48 bit hard drive addressing. Only new motherboards can be counted on to support this.

Windows 2000 service pack 3 or later. Windows XP service pack 1 and greater have this support built in. I assume this isn't a problem with Linux at all...

Windows 2000 requires the following registry edits:
support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;305098
Windows XP pre service pack one needs more work, updating the atapi driver will also be required in xp < sp 1.

Note, the MS article is not clear, to make the value 0x1 you need to set it to 1 in decimal notation. That will be changed to 0x1 binary notation by itself:


XP MS instructions here:
support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B303013

more here
homepage.ntlworld.com/mosaddique/Working%20with%20Large%20Hard%20Drives.html

Working with pci card controllers is described here:
www.techspot.com/vb/archive/index/t-6526.html

High end raid ide controller here:
www.3ware.com/support/index.asp

Lower end here:
www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=87&familyId=3

These are ata ide controllers, not raid controllers. Supposedly they allow hotswapping of drives using drive bays, tests coming soon on that.

<added>Read a historical overview of hard drive sizes and limits.
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For those who are a bit leery of mucking about in the registry, or for those whose registry menus are a bit different from what MS illustrates (as mine was), 48bitLBA.com has a no pains EnableBigLBA tool.

Maxtor has one also, but it only checks to see if the Value exists, not whether the Value Data is correct. The 48bitLBA tool checks both.
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I just started installing Windows on a new PC that has 2 300GB drives. It is now on one of the drives as a 127 gb or whatever size and does not recognize the other one as larger than that. How can I configure the drives so that I can get 300GB on both of them?
Seeing as how I have to install Windows first before getting the SP1 update or adjusting the registry. The Bios Ids both drives as 300Gb

Thanks in advance
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You install windows onto a partition, which is in general a good idea to do anyway. That is, don't install windows onto the 300 gigabyte default partition windows creates on install, choose the option on install to create a partition, make it whatever size you want, I like about 20 gigabytes, but it doesn't matter that much. I never keep any data on my windows partition, everything, email, my documents etc, all are on the second data partition. That's also very useful if you have to reinstall by the way.

Once you create the smaller partition, windows will see it fine, you install on it, then update to XP SP 2, then you will have access to the full drive sizes. Use windows native disk manager to create and format the second partition on the windows drive, and to create and format one or more partitions on the second drive.
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Actually I was just at the point of doing something like that, by trying to partition my 2nd HD, and installing a second windows OS in the smaller partition then removing the original OS from HD#2 and repartitioning it for data. Seems like a lot of shuffling so I will try your way

Thanks again
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I've had very good success with the following philosophy: All commercial operating system and software default selections are bad.

By taking control of the process from the first step, I've achieved excellent stability. Well, ok, not excellent, windows can't really achieve excellence. But reasonably good stability.

Creating the windows + software only partition, then keeping all data in its own partitions makes recovery change from a nightmare to just an annoying dream.

From the beginning, Microsoft windows has abandonned long time good computing practices in favor of 'ease of use', 'user friendliness' and so on. You won't find many unix type systems with everything on one partition, linux included. I try to make Windows be as unix like as possible in my installations, and it's paid off over the years.

If you do create a dedicated windows + software partition, you have to change all the paths manually, my documents, email, etc. Windows makes it hard to do that, just like they make almost all other good computing practices hard.
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I'm planning on using this PC for video cration so I will place all videos from Studio 10 on one HD and anything else on the other partitioned part of the C Drive-should only have to redo the OS partition when Windows crashes :)
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