Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

Johny · Guest

I just installed a new Seagate 200 GB hard disk as a second disk drive and it will not allow me to format the entire drive. I've played around with it and can only format about 130 GB.

Is there a size limit in XP or in the registry or something?

Isabella · Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 100

windows xp will use partitons or drives up to 2 terabytes using the NTFS file system, fat 32 partitions on any windows operating system should only be 32 gigs or less(even though it is possible to create larger). if your drive is not fully detecting, it could be your motherboards bios. some of the older boards were not designed to handle drives that big. many have bios updates that resolve drive read issues, or firmware updates for them.
also it would be helpful to know what utility you are using to set up the disk with.

Isabella · Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 100

Oh .. i just came across these things ....

SeaGate Data Recovery

XP has a limitation to 137GB
Maxtor has developped a tool to edit registries in order to support big capacity drives:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=11
But no idea if it works, in their solutions, they ask to have at least SP1:
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...eHQ9MTM3&p_li=

For the cable, you must have a 80-wire one as shown in the picture at the bottom of this link :
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...Cable80-c.html