Large Hard Drives and XP

[bfralia]

I've got a backup computer that's running Windows 2K pro with Veritas to do network backups. I use a process of Robocopy jobs to copy data from various servers onto a 250gb WD2500 hard drive. The drive uses the Promise Technologies board so the whole 250GB drive can be used as one partition.

I rebuilt the whole system around Windows XP pro and Veritas 9.1. All service packs and security updates applied for both products.

First time data copying began the hard drive got corrupted. The driver that XP selected for the P.T. card was out of date and incompatible. I went to their website and found a specific driver to resolve the large hard drive issue with XP.

If you're using XP and an internal hard drive over 138 gB, make sure you get the latest driver from the manufacturer and don't rely on XP to select it for you.

 

[bcastner]

If you're using XP and an internal hard drive over 138 gB, make sure you get the latest driver from the manufacturer and don't rely on XP to select it for you.

MS was one of the earliest supporters of 48-bit LBA, including adding in their MS KB articles the "switches" necessary to enable this from the earliest builds of Whistler.

XP SP1 is fully conformant with 48-bit LBA. As is Win2k both client and server after SP2.

It is not a driver issue. There are other issues that come to play other than their support of LBA when you exceed 138 gb.

BIOS, controller, cabling.... but the notion that XP SP1 or above will not ATAPI identify this drive is just wrong.

 

[bcastner]

I must note that if you use standby or hibernation, you should apply the patch discussed here for drives >138 gb.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=331958

 

[bfralia]

All said patches and service packs are applied, hibernation is turned off.

First off: The corruption problem IS a driver issue in this case, all the Microsoft patches and all the kings men....

I didn't say that XP doesn't recognize the drive, I said it selects an old and out of date driver for the card.

XP doesn't recognize a new unformatted drive as 250GB. Once partitioned with the utility software that comes with the disk, it recognizes the drive as 250GB and everything works fine.