Large Hard Drive and W7

[sloan448]

I'm liking W7 more and more all the time. I have 4 gigs of RAM running now. My Internet connection is a lot faster. The whole computer is a lot faster. I can access the XP partition and the old hard drive with XP on it from within 7. So I can transfer all the old files easily. I am having some  issues with older software but most of it's going OK, the stuff that isn't it's time to upgrade.

[jkolak]

I've just changed recently, too, and I'm getting to like it myself. Especially the taskbar switching makes things so convenient.

[sloan448]

It's been a long day, 12 hours, of updating software, downloading files, trying this and deleting that. It's been well worth it. It's only been two days using W7 and when I got to my other machine with XP and it looks old.

[patio]

Now would be a good time to create an image backup of your drive and burn it to DVD's...

[Allan]

Now would be a good time to create an image backup of your drive and burn it to DVD's...

+1

[killerb255]

Gimme a Break! WinXP, Vista, Win7 all support NTFS volumes of 2TB.

XP if SP1 or higher is installed (which it should be).  Before that, it doesn't without a hotfix, as BC_Programmer, et al have mentioned.

Also, Geek's advice is another consideration if the motherboard (or IDE controller) is extremely old and doesn't support bigLBA.  If the motherboard is old, then it doesn't matter what OS you're running--you'll still be limited to 137 GB.

[patio]

Also, Geek's advice is another consideration if the motherboard (or IDE controller) is extremely old and doesn't support bigLBA.  If the motherboard is old, then it doesn't matter what OS you're running--you'll still be limited to 137 GB.

It was determined it's a socket 939 MBoard...

[Geek-9pm]

It was determined it's a socket 939 MBoard...

Sop then, we will now assume from now on there will never ever again be a sloppy mob design by a lazy group of bogus engineers.

[BC_Programmer]

Sop then, we will now assume from now on there will never ever again be a sloppy mob design by a lazy group of bogus engineers.

    CPU Support: Supports AMD Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64/Sempron Processor, socket 939
    Bus Speed: HT 2GHz AMD® Athlon™64 With HyperTransport Technology up to 2G
    Expansion Slots: 4 x PCI, 2 x PCI-E 1x, 1 x PCI-E x 16
    Max Memory 4 x DDR SDRAM DIMMs
    Chipset: NVIDIA nForce4 (NF4-A9 A)

are you actually suggesting that a motherboard that is in such common use with a chipset that is in even MORE common use has some sort of subtle bug that makes it impossible to use drives larger then 137GB?

FIRST: the original issues with the size limit was not a "sloppy motherboard design by bogus engineers" but rather a limitation of the current standard at the time (before 48-bit LBA). I suppose they were supposed to preconceive the new version of ATA that supported 48-bit LBA, too, and build a controller for it on their motherboards.

The reason the first release of XP didn't support 48-lba is probably the same reason that windows 95 didn't support the "HALT" instruction on laptops: it didn't always work. with SP1a when they enabled it hardware was finally working properly with 48-bit LBA so they could enable it without any ill effects.