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    320GB HD drive for older Windows

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by hendra, Jul 22, 2009.

  1. hendra

    hendra Notebook Virtuoso

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    Which OS (before XP) that supports 320GB hard drive?
     
  2. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    None - certainly no Windows/Microsoft OS does. Even the original XP wouldn't support 320GB. What will generally happen is that the OS will only "see" about 127GB or so worth of the drive.
     
  3. dannylill1981

    dannylill1981 Notebook Guru

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    you need sp1 xp or above otherwise youll have to partition the drive into 2 128gb volumes. you may also need a bios update if its an old pc to allow it to be recognised.
     
  4. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Correct on both points. However, if your BIOS contains a hard-coded maximum hdd size, and there's no update that will remove that limit (the BIOS of my old Sony VAIO Z1A had a hard-coded limit of 137GB), you may be able to get around that limit by putting the new drive in an external enclosure, formatting it in there and then partitioning it into three partitions (each partition should be less than the BIOS limit, otherwise it'll get truncated by the OS). Once you've done that, you should be able to put the new drive into the computer and, provided you've got XP all up-to-date, you should be able to see all three partitions fully. However, do not monkey with the partition structure later on while booted on that computer, as any changes to the partition structure are likely to create a mess with the BIOS-coded limit.
     
  5. hendra

    hendra Notebook Virtuoso

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    Out of curiosity, does your Sony use SATA or IDE interface?
     
  6. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    IDE - it was 6 years old, so SATA wasn't available.
     
  7. hendra

    hendra Notebook Virtuoso

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    Do all computers with SATA interface support >137GB by the BIOS?
     
  8. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    So far as I know. According to the chronology in this Wikipedia article, any computer that supports the ATA/ATAPI-6 standard, or higher, uses 48-bit logical block addressing ("LBA") and thus is not subject to the 137GB limitation, and SATA 1.0 was introduced with the subsequent ATA/ATAPI-7 standard so, to my reckoning, that would imply that the SATA standards were developed after the 137GB limit was overcome and therefore that any computer that supports SATA should not be subject to the 137GB limit. However, check in your BIOS settings to see if anything's been hard-coded for that limit.
     
  9. Clutch

    Clutch cute and cuddly boys

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    We have a 7 year old XP desktop with IDE and we changed the disk controllers so it could read more, we have 2 500GB drives in there.
     
  10. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    That should work, provided that the dumb BIOS doesn't have the 137GB limit hard-coded in it. Desktops are different than notebooks and almost always have a much more sophisticated BIOS with a lot more options than notebook BIOSes do, so it may just be in old notebooks. At any rate, I don't know if all notebooks would have that limit hard-coded, but I do know that the Phoenix BIOS Sony was using in its laptops in late 2002-early 2003 had the 137GB limit hard-coded in it.