OT: Drive size misreported

Former user wrote on 11/24/2009, 8:54 AM
I just rebuilt a system using components from a couple of older computers I had laying around. I used two 250gig drives that were previously used in a RAID zero array. I set one as a master / system drive and the other as a slave / data drive. When I started up the Windows XP pro install CD the drives were reported as unpartitioned ~150gig drives although during POST the drives are correctly ID'd as 250gig drives.

And after getting the system installed and up and running, drive management also reports the drives as ~150gig. Any idea as to why? I really don't need the extra space, but does anyone think this might cause any future problems?

Thanks.

Jim

Comments

Former user wrote on 11/24/2009, 9:12 AM
Well, after doing all of the OS updates and patches, the additional space now shows up in drive managment.

I just partitioned the space and assigned drive letters and the extra ~105gigs per drive is now listed and available.

Strange. But, I guess it's not an issue now.

Jim
Dawdle wrote on 11/25/2009, 8:32 AM
This sounds like the old 48bit LBA issue.

Your hard drive size would have been incorrectly determined by the Windows XP installation if it was using the older 28bit addressing.

See here for more info:
http://www.48bitlba.com
Former user wrote on 11/25/2009, 10:29 AM
Yep. That sounds like the issue. My XP install disk was SP1 and when I finally got the system patched up to SP3, the extra space on the drives showed up. Well, it's good to know that this was fairly "normal" behavior with drives that are over ~140gigs.

Thanks for the link.

Jim