Hard Drive not formatting maximum capacity

[Matt909]

Hello,

I recently bought a 250gb hard drive to use in a disk caddy as a removable back for my other two 120gb drives. When I went to format it, I could only get 127gb. I found out that this could be due to my BIOS and unable to find anything about this on ASRocks specifications (K7VT2) I purchased an IDE card that does support large drives (Innovision EIO DM8401-H ATA133 IDE Controller Card). After installing this when the computer boots up it scans for IDE drives but gives me an error message about the cable is reporting conflicting information and I can still only get 127gb in Windows.

The cable is an old one from when I originally got my computer but does it really make any difference, it is definately plugged in the right way round and the drive is set to master. I am trying to format in Windows 2k Pro Service pack 4, is that anything to do with it?

Any help would be greatly appreiciated, I'm pulling my hair out trying to sort this out.

Cheers, Matt

[nizzy1115]

Hello,

I recently bought a 250gb hard drive to use in a disk caddy as a removable back for my other two 120gb drives. When I went to format it, I could only get 127gb. I found out that this could be due to my BIOS and unable to find anything about this on ASRocks specifications (K7VT2) I purchased an IDE card that does support large drives (Innovision EIO DM8401-H ATA133 IDE Controller Card). After installing this when the computer boots up it scans for IDE drives but gives me an error message about the cable is reporting conflicting information and I can still only get 127gb in Windows.

The cable is an old one from when I originally got my computer but does it really make any difference, it is definately plugged in the right way round and the drive is set to master. I am trying to format in Windows 2k Pro Service pack 4, is that anything to do with it?

Any help would be greatly appreiciated, I'm pulling my hair out trying to sort this out.

Cheers, Matt

i may have heard of there being limits some mother boards could handle (500gig maybe) i could be wrong, but are there any other hd's in your case?

[Matt909]

I've got two other 120gb drives, could that be he reason?

[Thong_Ispector]

That card says it supports large drives but it does not give the maximum size it supports
There are two types of IDE cables UDMA33 and UDMA66 I asssume you have the correct one.

I also assume you have LBA enabled for this drive in the cmos...

There is a 150 limit on many systems ... and depending on the head cyl configuration and the system reporting 120 something I think this is where the problem will be.

Even though the card you added may support large drives it may not be doing a sector/cylinder translation that your coms can understand.

[grebo]

Windows will not recognise a hard drive larger than 127GB and always formats larger drives to this amount.

You need to get a formatting tool which you should be able to get from the website of the maker of your hard drive. The formatting tools are usually bootable from floppy disc so just put the tool on a disc and set your BIOS to boot from floppy. This will format your hard drive to it's max capacity and then when you restart windows it'll appear as it's true size.

[Coconut Monkey]

Windows will not recognise a hard drive larger than 127GB and always formats larger drives to this amount.

If you have at least Service Pack 1 for Windows XP or Service Pack 3 for 2000 then Windows should recognise and properly format drives larger than 127Gb. :-|