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Old January 17th 04, 09:01 PM
Bill Anderson
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Pepperoni wrote:

"Bill Anderson" wrote in message
...

I didn't FDISK this drive, and I didn't use the Western Digital floppy
that came with it to set it up. I set up the drive using WinXP -- under
Disk Management. Then I formatted it using WinXP. Disk management now
reports that the drive is healthy. I've reformatted it since all the
problems started, by the way. There's nothing on it now -- no files at
all. I'm just trying to figure out what to do next.

So the question is -- has anyone else ever seen this sort of behavior?
Can it be a bad hard drive? I can still return it for another -- I
haven't owned it very long. Is there some sort of test I can run on it
to see if part of it but not all of it is damaged? What to do, what to


do?


Bill Anderson



Since the drive is new, empty, and possibly has data remaining, I would run
DLGDIAG1.exe from
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
You can return the drive to new condition by writing zeros to the entire
drive. Be aware that it may take 6 hours or more to run. (80gig HD time)
Much better than any format you can otherwise perform. It will run from
floppy, so I would unhook the other drives as a precaution.

The Diagnostics utility allows you to test the drive, print results for last
drive tested, repair errors found during the Test Drive option and write
zeros to the drive.

Pepperoni




Thanks! That was excellent advice. Actually, running the Windows
version of the Western Digital diagnostic utility pointed me, I hope, in
the right direction.

Even though WinXP has always reported the drive's capacity as 250
gigabytes, the WD utility said it was 134.22 gigabytes. The utility has
two windows for reporting on disk size -- the top window reports on the
size of the physical drives in the system, and the lower window reports
on the size of the logical drives. And in the LOWER window, which
reports on each of my system's partitions, the utility reports the drive
size as 250 gigabytes, or thereabouts. Very confusing.

The utility helped me find a Microsoft KBA (Knowledge Base Article
303013) about all this. It really does appear my system is not able to
use the disk for more than 134.22 gigabytes. I have an Asus P4T-E
motherboard, and I'm running BIOS upgrade 1005e -- I flashed to that
version long ago. According to the online documentation, 1005e does
include support for Logical Block Addressing (LBA), which is required to
exceed the 137 gigabyte limit. And the BIOS reports the drive size as
250 gigabytes.

I did find that my WinXP ATAPI driver was not the version the KBA said
is required. I've now upgraded the driver to the required version.

The KBA also said I might need to edit the registry, but when I went to
the registry location described in the KBA, I didn't find the registry
value I was looking for (EnableBigLba).

Right now I'm copying files onto the drive to see if I can exceed the
137 gigabyte limit. I sure wish I hadn't reformatted the thing last
night. It takes a long time to copy gigabytes of data, and I need to
copy 137 gigabytes just to see if updating the ATAPI driver will enable
the drive to hold more.

I'm betting it won't -- I'm betting that utility needs to report the
physical drive size as 250 gigabytes. But how to make it do that?

* BIOS seems OK for large drives.
* WinXP reports correct size for the drive.
* Running WinXP SP1

I wonder if I should have reformatted the disk, now that I have a new
ATAPI driver? Guess I'll find out soon.

Bill Anderson

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog