As long as the OS supports a large drive (XP SP1 and up or 2000 SP3 and up, along with Vista and 7, will), you can use the drive - even as a single 250G partition. That said, KEEP BACKUPS - anything that goes through the BIOS to write to the drive - and at some point, something will - will corrupt the drive and render it unreadable. May be the day after you install the drive or six months down the road, but you WILL turn the system on to an "unreadable hard drive" error at some point.
It doesn't matter how you partition the drive - you will lose access to it at some point, so if you choose to use a drive over 120G, you absolutely must have backups - it's not a matter of whether you'll need them, but when.
There are two things to worry about with regard to drive capacity on older IDE equipped computers. One is the algorithm used by the BIOS routines and the second is the algorithm used by the operating system. Older computers use a 28 bit routine to deal with the drives which gives a maximum capacity of 137 GB. Any operating system that uses the BIOS routines to communicate with the drive will have the same limit. Some operating systems use their own routines to communicate with the drive; an OS like Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later uses a 48 bit routine for the hard drive. Such an operating system can allow you to use a drive larger than 137 GB even though the BIOS routines will not support such a drive. There is a caveat on this; every OS uses the BIOS routines to begin the boot process. The 48 bit routines in the OS do not get used until the BIOS routine has been used to load a substantial piece of the OS. Use of the old 28 bit routine on a drive larger than 137 GB can lead to corruption of the drive data. Some users are able to get away without data corruption for very long periods of time, while others seem to be unlucky and wind up having to restore their OS and data after a while.
If you want to use a large drive you might be able to reduce the impact of the data corruption by dividing the drive into at least two partitions, making the first partition the boot partition, and limiting the size of the boot partition to something less than 137 GB. If you then use the second partition as the data partition you will at least avoid corruption of your data should you ever need to restore the OS.
I've never seen a drive that had a jumper for 137 GB; drives that have jumpers for restriction of the capacity usually limit the drive to 32 GB or less to compensate for some of the even older BIOSs that have trouble booting to a larger drive.
Thanks for the two replies above. They are extremely helpful. It looks as though the safest thing with a 250Gb is a small 20Gb boot partition for XP Home SP3 with data sitting on other partitions. At present my 100Gb is split into 3 partitions of 20, 40, 40.
ejn63
9 Legend
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87.5K Posts
0
January 28th, 2010 10:00
As long as the OS supports a large drive (XP SP1 and up or 2000 SP3 and up, along with Vista and 7, will), you can use the drive - even as a single 250G partition. That said, KEEP BACKUPS - anything that goes through the BIOS to write to the drive - and at some point, something will - will corrupt the drive and render it unreadable. May be the day after you install the drive or six months down the road, but you WILL turn the system on to an "unreadable hard drive" error at some point.
It doesn't matter how you partition the drive - you will lose access to it at some point, so if you choose to use a drive over 120G, you absolutely must have backups - it's not a matter of whether you'll need them, but when.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
January 28th, 2010 10:00
There are two things to worry about with regard to drive capacity on older IDE equipped computers. One is the algorithm used by the BIOS routines and the second is the algorithm used by the operating system. Older computers use a 28 bit routine to deal with the drives which gives a maximum capacity of 137 GB. Any operating system that uses the BIOS routines to communicate with the drive will have the same limit. Some operating systems use their own routines to communicate with the drive; an OS like Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later uses a 48 bit routine for the hard drive. Such an operating system can allow you to use a drive larger than 137 GB even though the BIOS routines will not support such a drive. There is a caveat on this; every OS uses the BIOS routines to begin the boot process. The 48 bit routines in the OS do not get used until the BIOS routine has been used to load a substantial piece of the OS. Use of the old 28 bit routine on a drive larger than 137 GB can lead to corruption of the drive data. Some users are able to get away without data corruption for very long periods of time, while others seem to be unlucky and wind up having to restore their OS and data after a while.
If you want to use a large drive you might be able to reduce the impact of the data corruption by dividing the drive into at least two partitions, making the first partition the boot partition, and limiting the size of the boot partition to something less than 137 GB. If you then use the second partition as the data partition you will at least avoid corruption of your data should you ever need to restore the OS.
I've never seen a drive that had a jumper for 137 GB; drives that have jumpers for restriction of the capacity usually limit the drive to 32 GB or less to compensate for some of the even older BIOSs that have trouble booting to a larger drive.
Inspiredron
1 Rookie
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11 Posts
0
January 30th, 2010 15:00
Thanks for the two replies above. They are extremely helpful. It looks as though the safest thing with a 250Gb is a small 20Gb boot partition for XP Home SP3 with data sitting on other partitions. At present my 100Gb is split into 3 partitions of 20, 40, 40.
Thanks again