External Hard drive not fully recognized - 48 bit LBA Support?

I only want to use the HD for storage, ie pictures, movies, etc and not an OS. This is similar to a thread posted 2 years ago which I don't think exactly answers my questions.

The external enclosure is a bytecc from www.newegg.com which says supports up to 300 gig hd, so the internal software( ATA controller) is fine on that end.

hi, welcome.

Xp with the SP1 update is able to work with those big drives.

The bios version you are running is capable of supporting this disk also.

I see no problems on the hardware side, so.... was that disk partitioned in a machine that did not support the disk properly ? Open disk management and see if there is a big, unpartitioned part on the disk. If so, you may choose to just create an extra partition or remove the 128 GB partition and create 1 big 200 GB partition.

I would strongly suggest to update to SP2 though, it is a great improvement.

Hope this helps.

 

 

Message Edited by Rijko on 05-08-2005 05:21 PM

Rijko,

Thank you for your response. I am not as well versed in hardware as I appear. Mainly, its alot of reading of FAQs because I've been at this for quite some time off and on.

I figured Phoenix A11 BIOS should work. Its 2004 program and hard drives > 137 gb have been out since 2003 at least?

I talked to a Dell support rep via chat and he said that the same phoenix bios on inspiron 8200 would NOT support anything over 60gb. He was surprised that it recognized 128 gb on the external hard drive. Him having said that, made me doubt his experience and/or his internal FAQ that he its looking at ;)

Do you think upgrading my IDE controller from Intel(r) 82801CAM Ultra ATA Storage Controller-248A will make a difference?

I asked the Dell Rep and he said that an upgrade did not exist...Again, Not a true statement because I checked on two driver upgrade sites and lo and behold Drivers upgrades exist..but Dell support site doesn't have it.

well, i am pretty sure large drives are supported.

The readme.txt for the latest bios does not state so, but in version A09 a bugfix comment states : 11. Fixed issue in which System Setup displays the wrong capacity
    for hard disk drives larger than 65GB.

So the 60 GB remark may be incorrect - the 8200 was sold with a maximum of a 60 GB drive i believe so he may have been looking at that. You can check in your bios for an entry that says LBA to confirm this and also run the Intel 48-bit LBA test program from a bootflop to test your system for LBA support to make sure.

I would not update your Intel controller for 2 reasons :

• you are connecting through the USB port and you do not use the IDE/ATA controller. No problems with your internal harddisk ? Don't update.
• IDE controllers are sometimes branded with OEM data so Intel software may not want to install. If the controller has been adjusted by Dell, installing updates from Intel may cause more problems than they solve. That may well be the reason Dell does not offer those files for download.
  

Updating XP to SP2 may help solve your problem, i would install SP2 anyway and see if your problem is solved.