137GB limitation woes.... need some help!

[Rogue3]

I finally got around to installing a Western Digital 160GB hard drive that I picked up last month. It seems no matter what I do it only reads 137GB. I know all the typical limitations situations and thought I had this one figured out before I even installed the thing. Here's my current setup info:

-I have Windows XP pro SP1
-I have a bios/MB that supports 48 bit addressing (Abit KT7A-raid with 7N bios, which according to their site supports it)

I can't tell what my bios is reading the drive as since I'm running it off of one of my raid controllers, along with a 120GB drive. I can see my other 2 drives on my regular IDE controllers, but it does not seem to list the raid ones.

I've tried the WD tools in DOS but it only sees it as 137GB. The tools crash whenever I run the windows version.

Partition magic 8.0 only sees it as 137GB.

I'm not quite sure what else to try here. I've run searches in multiple forums and tried everything I could find.

I have the drive set up as cable select, hooked up with my 120GB drive, also on cable select. I thought about moving it over to it's own IDE port (I have one raid one left). I don't know if this will make a difference though.

Any thoughts here?

 

[EeyoreX]

Are you sure the RAID controller supports 48-bit LBA. It is possible that the "standard" controllers do, but the RAID ones do not. It sounds like the hardware is not working/being detected properly. If you can, try connecting it to the standard IDE controllers and see what it is detected as. Also, you may have to enter the RAID BIOS to see the drive capacity, although on my Abit KR7A-RAID I get a listing of what size the drives are on bootup. See if the standard controller detects it properly. You may need to invest in a PCI controller. They can be had new for around $20.

\Dan

 

[Rogue3]

Thanks for the tip. I'm not sure how to go into the RAID BIOS. Can you tell me how to do that?

 

[Rogue3]

OK, I did manage to get into the RAID setup. It only reads the disc as 134000MB (give or take). I'll write abit tomorrow and see if the RAID controller supports 137+ drives. If not, I guess I will have to do some adjusting. I was hoping just to pop this one in and not have to mess with my other drives. Can the CD rom drives run off the raid controllers? I thought that I read somewhere that they can't, but i'll doublecheck.

 

[hairygit1]

do a search for :

"big drive enabler" and try out that software

 

[OZEE]

Are you really doing RAID? It doesn't sound like you are, but maybe I missed that. If that's the case, replace the card with a Promise or Maxtor card.

 

[Rogue3]

I'm not setting up a RAID system, only using the RAID ports for extra drives.

Well...I FINALLY managed to fix the problem. While my regular BIOS supported 137GB+ drives, my RAID BIOS did not. I found an update for my RAID BIOS and now it sees the whole drive!

Thanks for all the tips from everyone, which eventually led me down the right path!

In the end, I found a solution buried deep in the abit forums. Someone had the same problem on the same board as myself.