congo wrote on Nov 20^th, 2008 at 12:01am:


I do take the occasional incursion into my Boot-Up BIOS....

...out of curiosity...

...but there is nothing in my Award V6 BIOS which says;

"Hey F!....Have a peek here!...This is where you turn your LBA on!.."......!

...which is probably why it never gets turned on!... ...!

F..... ...!

...similarly, there is nothing in my Award BIOS that gives any options for AGP size/speed, Memory options, etc...etc...!

This is strange.. the manual only specifies LBA supported in the onboard RAID system

It mentions nothing about LBA elsewhere and nothing under the drive properties

I do know in the old days there were a few drives that needed the tool from the manufacture to enable support for BIOSs that did not have the setting.. like MAXBLAST as I recall

This may be an issue with a newer hard drive and a very old BIOS too


Partitioning the drive in DOS using a 3rd party tool may also be the answer.. they system may then recognize 2 128GB partitions on the hard drive

OK now the plot thickens

It looks to me like you simply have unallocated space that needs to be formatted


click START - CONTROL PANEL - ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS - COMPUTER MANAGEMENT - DISK MANAGEMENT


does that disk management window show the unallocated space as a separate drive without an assigned letter?

If so, right click... FORMAT

If not you may need a 3rd party disk partition tool to access the unallocated space and make it a partition, then MERGE the new partition into the original if you want to full 250 in onle partition

Formatting just that unallocated space area wont hurt the first section

just dont FORMAT the first part!  LOL




Splitting the disk is normal with XP SP1 Paul but its also why I questioned the Windows SP2 install. SP2 (the full install) enabled 48bit LBA for partitions larger than 128GB

My concern here is perhaps if you used the WEB update tool to install SP2 into XP there may be some kind of glitch where LBA is not properly initialized and working

What can happen if LBA is not working correctly in Windows is you can create the partition as one large drive but all the data could become corrupt when it trys to wrie above the 128GB blocks


So in your case what I would do is just right click that area of unallocated space and select to FORMAT it. Format using the default 4K cluster size if it asks and make it a LOGICAL drive if it asks

That will create a new drive letter and you can use it as a partition

If you wish the drive to be one large drive with only one partition unfortunately Windows does not support that 'MERGE" function and you need software like Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director and use the partition merge options


There is another option for full disk use... download the DOS TOOL for the hard drive.. this tool usually has options for creating partitions and formatting and it should allow you to manually wipe the drive clean and rebuild it as one drive at which point Windows should see it as a large HDD without doing anything in Windows. That would mean the current data on the drive would be lost

The only way to maintain the data and make it all one drive is to use the MERGE function in 3rd party disk software

I love it when a story has a happy ending..



Great thread lads, very informative input from everyone.

Mazza told Paul how to find what I pointed out and apparently he didn’t do it the first time or did not know about unallocated space which is also what spiraled the confusion. I assumed he did and the space was not showing up

oh well.. its fixed