Member Avatar for qusac

I know win2000 had a limit of 130gb for its HD's till one of the service packs (i think i read 4) but my windows install is up to date (nothing in windows update). my bios reports the correct size (250gb) and ive tried using partition magic to format it but that also shows 130gb.
My plan is to remove my old hd and clean install win2000 but i would like to copy all the data to the new hd first. i would also have prefered to have a single partition on the new drive if posable.
any advise on how to achive this would be v. helpful. and i dont care if i need to use a bodge.
Nicholas Costa

(p.s. not worth its own post but i got an invisable icon on my systray only showing my ip address id like to know what it is. iv used 4 difrent security tools but have nothing.)

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Short, practical summary and safe plan.

The 130/137GB ceiling is an LBA (logical block addressing) issue — Windows 2000 didn’t support 48‑bit LBA until Service Pack 3 (and later updates), and even then you must enable the OS setting and have a BIOS/host adapter that understands 48‑bit LBA. As said, SP3+ is required; in practice the reliable procedure is either (A) install the OS on a partition wholly inside the first ~137GB and then enable the registry setting, or (B) make the installation media LBA‑aware (see next paragraph). (itprotoday.com)

Copy / migration checklist (safe order)

  • Make a full image or clone of the old drive before you touch anything (image file stored to an external disk). Bootable tools work best because they don’t depend on the running OS. Clonezilla (free) or a commercial imaging product are the usual choices; boot the tool, connect both drives, image or clone, then verify the image. (clonezilla.org)
  • If you prefer file-level copy, boot a live Linux rescue system with NTFS write support (ntfs‑3g) and copy user folders to the new drive or to the external image.
  • For a clean Windows 2000 install on a very large drive: either install onto a <=137GB partition first, then add the registry value below and reboot, or edit the CD’s I386\SETUPREG.HIV so Setup runs LBA‑aware from text mode (that prevents setup from writing past the 137GB boundary). Use the registry entry exactly as shown: 
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters]
"EnableBigLba"=dword:00000001

(Do NOT enable this on a machine that boots other OSes that lack 48‑bit LBA support — it can cause corruption). (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)

Partitioning and capacity notes

  • ’s caution is valid: more, larger files means larger risk if the drive fails — image backups are essential. If you want a single partition, enable big‑LBA and then use a partitioner that understands LBA‑48 to resize/merge volumes; do this only after you have a verified image.
  • The “missing” space (250GB reported as ~232GB) is normal: manufacturers use decimal GB while Windows shows binary GiB, so advertised 250,000,000,000 bytes ≈ 232.8 GiB in Explorer. (seagate.com)

If there’s any uncertainty about your motherboard/BIOS LBA48 support, check the vendor docs or boot with a live tool that can report the drive geometry before you overwrite anything.

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Member Avatar for DMR

Support for drives/partitions greater than 137G did not appear until Service Pack 3, but even with SP3 (or 4) installed, there's still a Registry hack involved.

See the following Microsoft Knowledgebase article for the whole story:

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

You might wish to re-think having a partition that large. Imagine all the things you could loose if something goes wrong on it. Plus, try to back that size of media onto something else.

Unless you are digitizing video, or have a large set of projects that consume huge amounts of data, I would suggest you partition it down into more managable sizes, to help protect your data. Remember that partitioning will *not* protect you from a hardware crash of the drive, but it will allow you to format a troublesome partition without disturbing the other volumes.

Christian

Member Avatar for jwenting

if something goes wrong you're likely to loose the hardware so having multiple partitions will do you no good :)

I agree it's more prudent to have several smaller disks, but 100GB or so isn't excessive for today's overly large applications (which seem to have often been designed to use as much diskspace and CPU as possible in order to further hardware sales).

Member Avatar for qusac

Thanks for the help guys.the registory hack did not work for the old install so i made a 100gb partition and installed clean on that, then hack than worked fine.
i still only see 230gb (on a 250 drive) but i can live with that as my old drive was 40gb.
Thanks again for the help.
Nick

Member Avatar for DMR

Glad you finally got it to work. :)

The difference in GBs that you're seeing is mostly due to the fact that Windows and drive manufacturers use two different number/counting systems; binary and decimal. This results in the real, usable size of the drive being some percentage less than the size of the drive as advertized by the manufacturers. Because the difference is percentage-based, the actual difference in the amount of reported disk space can get quite sizable when you start working with multi-GB drives (over 17G for a 250G drive).

It's a bit confusing if you're only used to using our normal (decimal) counting system. but a bit more of an explanation can be found here:

http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm

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