Hard Drive

[Gorrillasnot]

I posted a thread here about the hard drive issue I'm having.
Basically I had a WD 160GB storage drive cut up into 3 partitions in my backup/file server rig that was showing signs of failure so I used ghost 8.0 to image it to a spare Maxtor 160GB drive. I then RMA'd the WD. When I got the new WD 160GB drive back from RMA I again used ghost to image the Maxtor 160GB to it. After ghosting I found a problem where the 3rd partition wouldn't let me access it. I went to the host PC and tried to access it and again same prob. Windows would just hang for a bit then it would give an error(cant remember exactly what the error was).
I swapped the Maxtor drive back in and it wouldn't let me access the 3rd partition either.
I swapped the WD drive back in and used partition magic 8.0 to try and reformat the 3rd partition, but the apply button was grayed out.
Next I tried deleting the partition and re-creating it with partition magic. It showed a maximum partition size of around 27GB when that partition use to be just over 40GB(I think).
I then ran a 3 pass killdisk on the WD drive and tried using data life guard tools to partition and format the drive. It seemed to work ok making the drive one large 152GB partition, but when windows booted up it said there was a problem with the drive.

Long story short I think when I imaged the original WD 160GB drive (149GB as seen in windows xp pro) it either marked part of the drive damaged or got confused and thought the drive was 149GB raw instead of installed. (
BTW I used default settings in ghost when imaging and imaged from booting to a CD that had ghost on it.)

Is there anyway I can "trick" this drive back to the 149GB installed size of the original?

thanks

 

[Matthias99]

What is the physical size of the drive being reported as (by the BIOS/WD tools/Windows)? If it's less than 160,000,000 bytes, something is wrong with the drive.

Ghost doesn't store anything about the physical size of the drive the original data was on; you can Ghost a 20GB image onto a 200GB drive, for instance, and it should work just fine (you'd still have another 180GB of empty space to create other partitions in).

 

[Gorrillasnot]

Windows is showing a capacity of 137,356,185,600
Also it shows that 68MB is being used when there is noting on the drive and I have reformmated it over and over again.
The WD and Maxtor drives are both showing up in windows as 127GB when before they where 149GB each installed.
I read somewhere that most operating systems are not configured for recognizing any hard drives over 137gb (127gb binary). Is there an update or setting in windows that can be changed? Both of these drives are connected to a Promise ATA controller card that was retail bundled with the original 160GB WD which should eliminate the MoBo BIOS as being the culprit.

thanks

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: phatTweaker
Windows is showing a capacity of 137,356,185,600

The WD and Maxtor drives are both showing up in windows as 127GB when before they where 149GB each installed.

I read somewhere that most operating systems are not configured for recognizing any hard drives over 137gb (127gb binary). Is there an update or setting in windows that can be changed?

Yep, that's your problem. Search for '48-bit LBA' for more information and the fixes you need. Updating to WinXP SP2 should also fix it.

Both of these drives are connected to a Promise ATA controller card that was retail bundled with the original 160GB WD which should eliminate the MoBo BIOS as being the culprit.

Does it work on the motherboard's ATA ports? Maybe the issue is the controller card; if *that* doesn't support 48-bit LBA, you'll see the same behavior even if Windows is patched.

 

[redhatlinux]

not sure just how this happend but you appear to need the LBA 48 bit fix for win XP. You should be able to find this in the XP knowledge base.

 

[Gorrillasnot]

I google 48-bit LBA and found the microsoft artical. I downloaded and applied the patch which upgraded my Atapi.sys to 5.1.2600.1135. Didn't fix the problem.
Next I found an updated BIOS for the Promise Ultra 100 TX2 controller card so I flashed it and rebooted. Still same problem.

Edit: Also tried the IDE on the MoBo. Same problem.

anyone know of any other fixes?

thanks

 

[Gorrillasnot]

Problem fixed!
I went back to the support website for the promise controller card and found an updated windows driver.
Downloaded and installed it and BINGO it worked.
I'm still confused as to why it worked before and then didn't work with the new drive unless the original driver for the controller card got corrupted or something.

thanks all