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Sata hard drive problem, please help

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7 replies

by arafat

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Hello all.

I have a problem with my hard drive. I know I was a noob for doing it this way but no turning back now.
I formatted my PC. On old config i had Winxp with SP2, and 2 SATA disks. One disk was 1 partition and with OS, and other had 2 partitions (both 150 GB) and was for data. After doing a format (wanted to put back my basic WinXP without SP2) and installing all drivers and programs, i noticed on Disk management console that my OS dont "see" other partition but only the first one.
My guess is that its because of change of OS's, but I dont know why it happened if I merged both partitions BEFORE format.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have no data needed on that disk, I just need to be able to use it whole.

Thanks in advance,
Zoran

7 replies

by arafat

I managed to get Partition magic see whole disk (320 GB), and managed to create 1 partition, but on disk management it still sees just a part (about 128 GB) and not whole.

by sue t

Are they formatted as fat32 or ntfs? If when you reinstalled you chose fat32 as the format then convert it to NTFS and see if that fixes your problem. You will find a how to if you need it at this website http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx that will explain how to convert to NTFS without losing anything.

by arafat

My hard disk has been ntfs, before and after format.
Should i make conversion to FAT32 and then back to NTFS? Would that work?

by ic-it

You need to upgrade at least to SP1 in order to have the 48bit addressing and overcome the drive size limitation.

by arafat

Apparently I found some patch that changed the registry key EnableBigLba to 1, and it solved my problem.

Thanks to all of you, you helped alot.

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