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External Hard Drive Upgrade

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crazyj   03-12-2007 at 06:36:00 PM

I have a Western Digital WD1200B005-RNN enclosure. I tooke the WD1200BB 120GB hard drive out and put a Western Digital WD3200JB 320GB hard drive in to try to upgrade it.

Windows will only register 128GB of space on the drive. I can only assume this is limitations due to what little hardware is in the enclosure.

Is anyone familiar with a way, program or even messing w/ the enclosure itself, to change the enclosure to allow the hard drive to be bigger than 128GB?

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Bronze Storage badge evongugg   03-12-2007 at 07:07:21 PM
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Do you have XP SP1 and 48-bit LBA-compatible BIOS?

http://support.microsoft.com/defau [...] -us;303013

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crazyj   03-12-2007 at 07:11:06 PM
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Yes. I even hooked the hard drive up directly to the PC and it shows up correctly as a 300,000,000 byte, 320GB hard drive.

Sorry I forgot to mention that.

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crazyj   03-12-2007 at 07:15:44 PM
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I now have a theory. I think the enclosure has a chip inside that only allows for FAT32 File system and therefore only allows for 128GB or "127.53 gigabytes" according to Wikipedia. Anyone able to confirm or deny this?

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Bronze Storage badge evongugg   03-12-2007 at 07:51:04 PM
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Like he said, the enclosure may be limited to 128 GB drives, because that is the limit of the chip.

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Bronze Storage badge Paperdoc   03-12-2007 at 09:39:54 PM
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That is possible. 48-bit LBA support necessary to recognize over 137GB came later, and some earlier enclosures did not have it. See if the WD website can confirm this in the unit's specs.

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