XP SP2 EnableBigLBA=1 Hard Drive > 137g

Thanks for your help. Do you have recommendation for a
partition manager?

Also, can anyone confirm XP SP2 contains the fixes for
EnablebigLBA that SP1 did? If so, why didn't SP2 install
EnablebigLBA=1 on installation?

As for me using Fat32, I have much more experience using
FAT32. This is my first time using NTFS. I hope it is
better than FAT32 performance and recovery wise. I wanted
to stop XP from installing and used FAT32 as I knew the
associated Fdisk was a safe bet to restore the drive to a
bare drive.

Can you tell my why XP SP2 placed 69g of freespace and 21g
unallocated? Why wasn't all freespace or unallocated so
that I can create one large partition. I have no extended
partitions on this drive. After setting up both, the 69g
formatted to logical drive and the 21 unallocated
formatted to a primary partition. Do you think they are
stable and usable configured the way they are?

I understand what all of you are saying about the actual
disk size reported but why then, does my other Western
Digital 60g EIDE and Seagate 9g SCSI hard drive actually
report the correct drive size in Disk Manager when the new
160g is reported with less?


Is there a way to get SP1?

Thanks..

Neil


You need a 3rd party tool to combine a current partition
with unallocated
space. If you want to do it without suc a tool, trash your
40GB partition and
remake a new partition with all the unpartitioned space.
To do this, go to
control panel/performance and maintenance/administrative
tools and click on
Computer Management. Go to the disk management tab, and
right click on the
partition you want removed. Once you have done that, make
a new partition
with the remaining space using the same program.

BTW your reported disk size is normal, you don't actually
have 160GB of
usable space. The BIOS lists it in metric terms, Windows
lists it in binary
equivalent terms. I hope this helps. I fint it curious
that you had to use
FAT32 instead of NTFS, can you explain in more detail?

"Neil" wrote:

Hello all,

I am another lucky XP Pro user with another hard drive
137g problem.

I bought a Western Digital 160g EIDE hard drive and
proceeded to do a new installtion of XP. When I first
set
up a partition on the drive, formatted NTFS, my BIOS
could
not see the whole 160g. Researched the problem and
found
out I need to upgrade BIOS, which I did. Bios now
reports
160g primary master. Tried to delete new NTFS parition
but was forced to format FAT32 over it. Used old Fdisk
to
remove all partitions. Reboot. When the drive was bare
again, created new 20g and 40g partition. Formatted and
installed XP on 20g partition. Installtion went well.
Tried to download SP1 to get support for hard drive
137g. XP SP1 is no longer available. Microsoft claims
that all SP1 fixes are in SP2 and I do not need SP1.

Installed SP2 and XP lists the drive as 149.05g not the
160g it really is. Remaining 90g (should be 100g) is
listed in disk manager as 69.40 freespace and 21.06
unallocated. I have not been able to combine the
freespace and unallocated.
EnablebigLBA was not in registery after SP 2 install. I
got Western Digital Data Lifegaurd to add Enablebiglba =
1.
Drive is still reported as above.
I want to create one drive with the remaining room;
should
be 100g.

Can't?

Please tell me if SP2 indeed includes enablebiglba. Is
my
drive stable? How to create a 100g partition using the
all of the remaining room. Why is XP only reporting the
drive as 149.05g instead of the 160g the BIOS reports?

To really fix the problem, I am willing, if need be, to
wipe the drive again spend another night reinstalling
everything.
Thanks..

Neil

..