PCA Forums

my mp3 collection has grown rapidly and i found myself running out of storage...so i found a good deal on a 200GB (7200rpm/8mb cache) western digital. i plan on using it for storing mp3's and also for video ripping. this should be large enough to last a little while.

one question: the last HD i installed (120GB western digital) is split into multiple partitions (30GB each) because i had trouble creating anything larger than that. i have the newest BIOS and i thought that FAT32 supports up to 2TB partitions. is there a limit when using "Basic" disks rather than upgrading them to "Dynamic" in Win2000? i'd like to just have one or two huge partitions for this new hard drive.

I think its a bios limit. it needs to support 48 bit addressing....so if it does you are set. what mboard is it? what chipset?

Greg

FAT32 is limited to something like 8 terrabytes

NTFS can go into the Exabyte range.

ALSO check your mobo's BIOS to make sure it supports drives larger than 137Gb. It's likely that the hard drive came with a Promise controller (my new 160Gb WD drive did) to get around that problem.

Win2k/XP won't allow to create FAT32 larger than 30GB, they try to enforce the usage of NTFS that way. Win2k/XP can handle larger FAT32 volumes, you could use a trusty Win98 bootdisk and FDISK that huge mofo, the program might give an error or say the drive is only a couple GB but you can use the % values to partition it when needed (100% for one huge partition).

If yer BIOS doesn't support HDDs larger 137GB and there's no addon controller in the HDD box than you need an ATA133 controller, they can handle those big drives.

you mean you can't answer my question without knowing the mobo details? hehehe...

shuttle AK31 v3...latest (and last) BIOS available.

the drive did include a Promise ATA100 controller (not133...but that doesn't matter much to me). i take it the Promise controller will remove any doubt with the mobo BIOS and allow large enough drives. i suspected that win2000 was limiting me. i will just go with NTFS on this one and avoid the prob.

thanks for the help!