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WesternDigital (WD800) installproblem

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I recently bought a Western Digital WD800 80GB HD (model: WD800BB-53BSA0). I'm not able to install it. Creating and formatting a partition is not usually a problem, but this time neither Win2000 pro or server diskmanager can do it. The creation of the partition (i've tried several configs) is OK, Windows reports the disk as healthy, but when starting to format the prosess never comes to the 1.st %. The machine does not hang, but diskmanager does. Then I tried using Partition Magig 6.0 and partition edit. The same thing happens. I've been able to create and format several 2 GB FAT16 partitions, but none using NTFS or FAT32.
The BIOS on the machine reports 65GB (sounds NOT OK), but Win2K reports 76,6 GB.(Sound OK). Bios is AWARD 4S4EB2X0.86A.0018.P17 on an Intel BX440 AGP chipsset.

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by wanabedrsean

your PC?s system software occasionally runs into capacity limitations which can appear in various ways: including BIOS limitations, controller card limitations, and operating system limitations. Recently, Western Digital started shipping their 80 GBhard drive. For drives of this capacity (and higher), several Microsoft Operating System limitations have been identified and confirmed by Microsoft. Microsoft Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition also have a limitation with correctly displayingthe capacity for drives larger than 64 GB. This limitation does not result in data loss. The partitioning utility FDISK and the formatting utility FORMAT will incorrectly show the capacity of the drive minus 64 GB. For example, if the drive is 80 GB, the capacity is shown as 11 GB. Microsoft has acknowledged this issue and has released a fix for FDISK. More information on the limitation and the FDISK fix can be found by reading Microsoft's Knowledgebase Article. Please remember that depending on the particular utility used, the capacity of the hard drive can be reported in either in decimal gigabytes, where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes or in binary gigabytes where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. FDISK reports a drive?s capacity in binary gigabytes. A WD800 hard drive?s capacity will be reported as approximately 75 binary gigabytes.
Note: If Western Digital?s Data Lifeguard Tools are used to partition and format the drive, no fixes are required.

by wanabedrsean

here is wd's support number

EIDE Hard Drive Support
(800) 275-4932
Monday-Thursday 9 am - 6 pm CST*
Friday 9 am - 4 pm CST*
Saturday 8 am - 11:45 am, 1 pm - 5 pm CST*

by grandhighdruid

I would say that it is because what the BIOS sees and what your OS sees is so off, it gets confused. The ONLY way I ever got an 80GB hard drive is be properly seen in a system is to set the hard drive jumpers to a drive limitation setting, which varies between hard drives. I would recommend trying this before calling tech support, as the last time I talked to someone, they said that their version of Disk Mangler wouldn't support 80GB hard drives. Of course, this was almost a year ago. Once this drive setting was done, I found that I didn;t even need a disk mangler software, which surprises and pleased me! Hope this helps!

by kblast523

Western Digital has drivers that you can execute to floppy from their website to assist in install. Go to: http//www.wdc.com/service/ and under lifeguard support you can download all you need, including .pdf manuals. Good luck

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