Some months ago, I asked the follow question (among others):

registry in order to use HD partitions over 137GB, as with Win2K?
Or is XP smart enough to automatically use the correct LBA type
(24bit or 48bit) based on HD size? (I'm looking to avoid any
repeats of an incident which occurred about a year ago in which
thousands of files on my computer were destroyed because
registry entry "EnableBigLBA" got reset to 0 on a clean
reinstall of Win2K.)

One of the few persons who attemped a relevant answer
was Brian A. Sesko, who wrote:

If the motherboards BIOS supports large capacity disks and
you install XP SP1 or higher there shouldn't be any problem.

Hmmm. You realize, I hope, that "problem" means "something
which is as it shouldn't be". Hence it's ALWAYS true that
"there shouldn't be any problem". (Tautology.)

So I'm not quite clear on your answer. Are you saying that
*NO* manual edit of the registry is necessary to safely use
hard disks larger than 137GB? You mention SP1. What about
the bare OS without any service pack? I have to install
that before DLing any SPs, right? Hopefully it won't mess up
my big HD before I have a chance to install the SPs?

So that you can understand why I'm being so nit-picky about
this, let me give you some background. I'm currently running
Windows 2000, where the 137GB issue is a MIGHTY BIG problem.
(It "shouldn't be" a problem, of course; but it is.)
IF YOU DON'T MANUALLY EDIT THE REGISTRY, ALL YOUR DATA WILL BE
DESTROYED. AND THE EDIT THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IS EXTREMELY
NON-INTUITIVE, DEEPLY BURIED, AND NOT WELL PUBLICIZED:
Go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Param eters
and change "EnableBigLBA" from 0 to 1.

Hence, perhaps you can see why I'm being a stickler on this.

Brian also wrote:

To better assist you in your learning curve, see:
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...=Search+Groups

Hmmm. And wade through thousands of items of other people
having similar (but different) problems with similar (but
different) causes and cures? I see that some of the hits
involve people who later found out that their BIOS didn't
support their HD. Old BIOSs see all HDs bigger than 137GB
-- say, for instance, 100TB, or 100PB -- as being 137GB.
So if you use, say, a 250GB hard disk, all data you attempt
to write to the 138-250GB range will over-write data in the
0-137GB part of the disk, resulting in destruction of the
operating system, programs, and data. Well, duh.
That, however, is not my problem, as the BIOSs on the
computers I use all support 48-bit LBA.


SO.... My main question remains:

In the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, is any manual
registry edit required for safe usage of hard disks larger
than 137GB?


--
Cheers,
Robbie Hatley
lonewolf at well dot com
www dot well dot com slant tilde lonewolf slant