160Gig hard drive on BP6 ???

[Murta]

Is this in any way possible.. I´m running BP6 with latest BIOS and windows 2000 Pro.. But I can´t get more than 130Gig out of my 160Gig disk. I heard something about 48bit LBA? Does that have anything to do with it??

[hyperspace]

Welcome to BP6.Com, Murta!

Are you using the standard IDE controller or the on-board HPT366 controller?

[Murta]

I flashed the BIOS to "BP6 RU With RAID HPT368 & P3 "... When I boot with the disc on the HPT controller it doesn´t find the drive at all but when I boot with the disc on the motherboard controller it shows up, but only as 130Gig..

[RRLedford]

use a Promise Ultra IDE 133 TX2 controller.
your life will improve when the HPT366 IS NO LONGER PART OF IT.
so will the speed + useable capacity of your 160GB drive

[HowardZ]

Try reading a bit at www.48bitlba.com

[starplex]

Lately I bought a Western Digital WD1600JB (160 Gig) hard drive as an upgrade for my BP6. I expected that I could only use 137 Gig of the 160, but after partitioning and NTFS formatting Windows XP Pro (SP2) reported a volume size of 149Gig or 152625 Meg. I could not believe that the old BP6 would support 137+, because when I ran the BIOS IDE detection it only reported 136 Gig. Then I ran the extendend test of WD's Data Life Guard Diagnostics and it passed. Does anyone have simular experiences?

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BP6 dual Celeron 366 @550, RU bios, 768 Meg RAM, IBM DJNA-370910 (9.1GB) and WDC WD1600JB (160GB) on ATA33 (not using HPT at all), Win XP Pro (SP2)

[hyperspace]

Welcome to BP6.Com, starplex and Howard2 !

Thanx for the information!

[Wolfram]

AFAIK the BIOS (or controller BIOS) only has to support large drives (=48bit LBA) if the OS does not.

So, if the drive boots at all (which may or may not work) and you use Linux, Windows 2000 or XP, the OS should be able to use the full capacity.

I'm still not sure about that fix you have to enable in registry. 48bit LBA support was introduced with a Windows 2000 service pack (SP3, IIRC). But the MS knowledgebase still said you have to enable a certain registry key to make it work, even after SP3. Don't know if this also applies to XP.

Probably that fix is not necessary if the BIOS already support 48bit LBA.

One thing may be dangerous: If your BIOS does NOT support it and you normally use an OS which DOES support it, everything is fine UNTIL you put in some DOS floppy (or other OS without 48bit LBA support) and start writing to the disk. This may wreck your whole HD content. IIRC the OS does not know where the drive ends and may start writing at the beginning of the disk when it tries to write data beyond the 128GB barrier.

I haven't tried a 160GB drive on the BP6 yet, but my current 120GB Samsung (on the HPT366...ok, you warned me ) is recognised by the BIOS with only 55GB capacity and the drive is fully usable in Windows 2000 and Red Hat 9 Linux.

[Wolfram]

I just did it: I put a brand new Samsung SP2014N 200GB (the new series, with 125GB platters) on my BP6. On the HPT666, erm 366, to be precise...

The HPT BIOS recognized the drive as a 65535 MB drive, but my old Samsung SV1203N (120 GB, 5400rpm) was also reported with a size around 50GB.

Windows 2000 SP4 "saw" only 128GB. So I copied the old 120GB drive sector-by-sector to the new one (with Acronis TreuImage 8 ), disconnected the 200GB drive from the BP6 and put it on my gaming rig, an Athlon64 PC. Then I created a new partition on the remaining free space (~74GB). This partition exceeds the 128/137GB boundary.

Putting the 200GB drive back on the BP6, all Windows drive letters were restored correctly (which really surprised me, usually I have to clear the disk signature to make Windows boot again. But the last drives I cloned were XP installations, maybe this works better with Win2K). Fedora Core 3 (loaded with the Windows boot loader) also still works.

And the most important thing: The 128GB+ partition is there, at full size! The final thing I have to check is if things will still be ok when I fill that partition with data (EnableBigLBA is set in the registry, btw).

It's not that I couldn't afford an extra controller... I just think it's more elegant this way, using the supplied onboard components. Even if Lucifer's-even-more-evil-twin is among them, our infamous HPT366...

[purrkur]

Not bad! It is also funny to note that you wouldn't have ANY of these issues with Linux, which would right off the bat just report a 200Gig drive

As for the HPT366 and your Samsung drive, I think that it will work just fine IF that brand of drives works well with the 366. I guess only time will tell.

[Wolfram]

Yes. I hope all will be fine, like it was with the 120 GB Samsung. Had trouble with Seagate drives, as I mentioned earlier.

I had already bootet Fedora Core 3, but I forgot to check the reported partition sizes...

Will do an in-depth-check in about a week, I'll be off to Prague on Monday for a short holiday...

[phaedrus]

Not bad! It is also funny to note that you wouldn't have ANY of these issues with Linux, which would right off the bat just report a 200Gig drive

Sounds like what I've done with my work machine. It's a PII-350 system, a surplus special. It came with a 10GB drive, which crashed on me after a couple months. One of the grad students and I went poking around to get a new drive, and we got a 40GB drive. The BIOS would not recognize the drive (at all), but I could boot from CD into Linux and Slackware installed with no hitches. The only problem was that I had to boot it with a CD, until I dug out a 400MB HDD that I could move the root partition too. It works fine now...

The lesson, Linux does not care about what the BIOS thinks. It's just the initial stage for the boot loader.

Jeff

[purrkur]

Phaedrus: You can boot from the drive if you want, just make sure that the boot partition is within the size limits imposed by BIOS.

I used a Dell Pentium Pro machine for a file server for some time, running a 40 gig disk. This particular Dell wouldn't work with disks with sizes above the notorious 8.4 gig limit. So I put the boot partition onto the part of the disk that BIOS could see (the first 8.4 gig). That was all that was needed to get it to boot. Once the kernel takes over, BIOS is not used anymore for disk size configuration.

[Wolfram]

I just did it: I put a brand new Samsung SP2014N 200GB (the new series, with 125GB platters) on my BP6. On the HPT666, erm 366, to be precise...

The HPT BIOS recognized the drive as a 65535 MB drive, but my old Samsung SV1203N (120 GB, 5400rpm) was also reported with a size around 50GB.

Windows 2000 SP4 "saw" only 128GB. So I copied the old 120GB drive sector-by-sector to the new one (with Acronis TreuImage 8 ), disconnected the 200GB drive from the BP6 and put it on my gaming rig, an Athlon64 PC. Then I created a new partition on the remaining free space (~74GB). This partition exceeds the 128/137GB boundary.

Putting the 200GB drive back on the BP6, all Windows drive letters were restored correctly (which really surprised me, usually I have to clear the disk signature to make Windows boot again. But the last drives I cloned were XP installations, maybe this works better with Win2K). Fedora Core 3 (loaded with the Windows boot loader) also still works.

And the most important thing: The 128GB+ partition is there, at full size! The final thing I have to check is if things will still be ok when I fill that partition with data (EnableBigLBA is set in the registry, btw).

Damn... it does NOT work rpt. NOT.

Filling the 128GB+ partition with data resulted in complete data corruption on that drive (done in W2K SP4). Fortunately, I did that while the cloned old 120GB drive was still intact, so I didn't even have to use a backup.

But I'm still a little surprised that this happened. From theory, I thought Windows (2000 SP4, BigLBA registry fix manually enabled) should handle the large drive. Remember, I could only partition 128GB on the BP6 and had to partition the whole drive on a different machine. Irregular behaviour of my W2K, maybe.

[purrkur]

Damn... it does NOT work rpt. NOT.

Filling the 128GB+ partition with data resulted in complete data corruption on that drive (done in W2K SP4). Fortunately, I did that while the cloned old 120GB drive was still intact, so I didn't even have to use a backup.

But I'm still a little surprised that this happened. From theory, I thought Windows (2000 SP4, BigLBA registry fix manually enabled) should handle the large drive. Remember, I could only partition 128GB on the BP6 and had to partition the whole drive on a different machine. Irregular behaviour of my W2K, maybe.

Wolfram,

I would be very very interested to hear if you would experience the same type of corruption under Linux.

So far everybody and their brother is dumping on the HPT366 saying it is crap. Well, I would like to know if the HPT366 is crap when used under Windows! My guess is that Linux would be able to handle it, but of course that is only guesswork from my part until *someone* tests it

[Wolfram]

Wolfram,

I would be very very interested to hear if you would experience the same type of corruption under Linux.

So far everybody and their brother is dumping on the HPT366 saying it is crap. Well, I would like to know if the HPT366 is crap when used under Windows! My guess is that Linux would be able to handle it, but of course that is only guesswork from my part until *someone* tests it

You are right. That would be interesting indeed.

I'll clone my old drive again to the 200GB drive and check that. Shouldn't even be too much work.

[purrkur]

You are right. That would be interesting indeed.

I'll clone my old drive again to the 200GB drive and check that. Shouldn't even be too much work.

Excellent! Who knows, we may shed some new light on the good ole 366

[BCN]

well hpt 366 under windows corrupts data widely on any HDD connected to it, do not know under linux, but since it trashed my 60Gb hdd with 50% of data lost due to corruption.... I have never ever used it!

[Voxell]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here on this forum and what I've seen so far is really nice. Very much info I've looking for, it's all here...

Well, on topic, Iwas reading this thread of lba48 support and the use of 137gb + hd's

I'm currently running Bios version RU with hpt 1.30B (modded by paltrude). At this moment I've two 120 GB hd's attached to it and it's running like charm...

What I want is upgrading one of these disks to something bigger. But I couldn't find a definitive answer to this question.... The question is, is it possible yes or no? Is somebody using a hd bigger then 137 gb on his hpt 366?

And if it's not possible on the hpt 366, is it possible on the ata33 controller?

I'd really like to hear from you guys about this...

[BCN]

it seems the only way to know is to try and if not you are to buy some new IDE controller

[Wolfram]

Well, on topic, Iwas reading this thread of lba48 support and the use of 137gb + hd's

I'm currently running Bios version RU with hpt 1.30B (modded by paltrude). At this moment I've two 120 GB hd's attached to it and it's running like charm...

Same here with one 120 GB Samsung. What brand are you using?

What I want is upgrading one of these disks to something bigger. But I couldn't find a definitive answer to this question.... The question is, is it possible yes or no? Is somebody using a hd bigger then 137 gb on his hpt 366?

And if it's not possible on the hpt 366, is it possible on the ata33 controller?

Well, as mentioned earlier in this Thread, I tried to hook up a Samsung 200GB on the HPT366. Looks like it does NOT work in Windows. Drive's recognised, but you can't partition more than 128GB. Partitioning the whole drive on another PC and filling it with data produced complete data corruption.

I tried to check it with Linux. But I was stuck: I thought the easiest way to fill the drive with data was to copy stuff from my Windows partitions. Unfortunately I must have messed up something in fstab: I can't boot FC3 anymore, I always get:

checking file systems: no such file or directory
fschk.ext3: Bad magic number in super block on attempting to open /dev/hdg [failed]

hdg would be the last (128GB+) partition (ext3). Sorry, but how do I edit stuff (fstab in this case) from the command line? Didn't have time yet to look that up.

I was a bit angry about that. I was surprised that it is possible to keep Linux from booting just by mounting Windows partitions the wrong way. Windows seems to be more robust, at least when you need to have some GUI to start troubleshooting. Command line always reminds me of C64 days... SCNR

Btw, I noticed that some KDE system information tool and qtparted both "saw" the whole drive, not only the first 128GB. Used qtparted to make that hdg partition because I couldn't find a tool for that in KDE or Gnome (though I still think there is one).

[Voxell]

Thanks for the explanation...

I have two brands: 1 maxtor diamondmax 9 and 1 seagate barracuda.

The first harddisk was running perfectly with an old bios (1.28 ), but the second disk wasn't recognised... After upgrading to v1.30B the disk was recognised and their both running perfectly under windows 2000

About linux:
You can manually edit fstab with vi. It's located in /etc/fstab

I have a very nice rescue boot disk with a lot of tools on it. You can download it for free at this website: http://www.sysresccd.org/

It also has qtparted on it and it comes with a graphic interface (it's called partgui if I remember well) Maybe you can try something with this tool....

Anyway: I think I will buy that harddisk and I'll try to get it running with linux.... If linux isn't depending on the bios, then it can't be that hard to get it running....

If you have any more info, let me know and if I have it up and running I'll make a new reply here....

[Voxell]

oops... double post...

[purrkur]

I tried to check it with Linux. But I was stuck: I thought the easiest way to fill the drive with data was to copy stuff from my Windows partitions. Unfortunately I must have messed up something in fstab: I can't boot FC3 anymore, I always get:

checking file systems: no such file or directory
fschk.ext3: Bad magic number in super block on attempting to open /dev/hdg [failed]

hdg would be the last (128GB+) partition (ext3). Sorry, but how do I edit stuff (fstab in this case) from the command line? Didn't have time yet to look that up.

I was a bit angry about that. I was surprised that it is possible to keep Linux from booting just by mounting Windows partitions the wrong way. Windows seems to be more robust, at least when you need to have some GUI to start troubleshooting. Command line always reminds me of C64 days... SCNR

Btw, I noticed that some KDE system information tool and qtparted both "saw" the whole drive, not only the first 128GB. Used qtparted to make that hdg partition because I couldn't find a tool for that in KDE or Gnome (though I still think there is one).

Hello Wolfram,

Could you post your /etc/fstab contents??

I am also not sure what you are trying to do. Does the disk still have it's Windows partition and do you intend to use the windows file format? I guess then that you are talking about NTFS. I would recommend against using Linux to write to an NTFS partition because while it will work in most cases, there are still issues with it. NTFS is one of Microsofts black boxes and they refuse to give information on how to sucessfully write to it (reading works just fine).

Post your fstab file and I'll take a look at it. I think I know what is wrong. As Voxell said, editing fstab can be done using something like vi or vim but if you are not used to those tools then they are not easy to use for the first time. What you can also do is to run any graphical editor as root when you enter X. So what you can do (for example if you use KDE) is to open up Konsole, do "su -" and then enter the root password. From there, just write "kate" and you'll get your gui editor. But you have to do this as root because all files under /etc can only be edited by root.

Btw, qtparted is actually a KDE tool.

And last but not least, pass us the output from the command "mount" as well.

cheers,

[Wolfram]

I have two brands: 1 maxtor diamondmax 9 and 1 seagate barracuda.

The first harddisk was running perfectly with an old bios (1.28 ), but the second disk wasn't recognised... After upgrading to v1.30B the disk was recognised and their both running perfectly under windows 2000

I guess in my case it's also a BIOS/driver issue.

About linux:
You can manually edit fstab with vi. It's located in /etc/fstab

I have a very nice rescue boot disk with a lot of tools on it. You can download it for free at this website: http://www.sysresccd.org/

It also has qtparted on it and it comes with a graphic interface (it's called partgui if I remember well) Maybe you can try something with this tool....

Thanks for the info!

Anyway: I think I will buy that harddisk and I'll try to get it running with linux.... If linux isn't depending on the bios, then it can't be that hard to get it running....

From theory I thought Windows also should be able to handle large drives on it's own once the OS has booted. It didn't in this case, that's why I think it is a driver issue.