Motherboard / hard drive size

[scsi]

I have an intel motherboard D875PBZ. I use a WD 36GB 10,000rpm sata hard drive for the operating system and such. There is a scsi array used to store video clips. I am using windows XP Professional. I received a WD 150GB 10,000rpm sata raptor X. I want to use this drive in place of the 36GB drive.

When I pluged it in and tried to reload Windows I only get have way through the install and when it is time for windows to load it's files the computer reboots and starts at the begining.

I tried this drive on another machine with the same result. When I go into setup the drive is listed. It can be formated. I built this machine in 2003~. The other computer is older also.

I had to do a Bios recovery to get the computer back to where it was with the old drive. HERE IS THE QUESTION DOES ANY ONE KNOW IF THIS MOTHERBOARD ( or more to the point the Bios)HAS A LIMIT ON HOW BIG A DRIVE IT WILL SUPPORT? Intel does not have support anymore and I haven't been able to find information about drive limitations. I do not beleive the drive is defective. More information:When I load the bios with the 36GB drive in place I can feel the drive rotate. When I load the Bios with the 150GB drive, the drive does not rotate (it has a window to see in).

Thanks

 

[r_manic]

Hi scsi... I've found a page with the mobo's documentation here: http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/D875PBZ/sb/CS-021824.htm

Have you looked through this? Is the info you need there?

 

[jitpublisher]

If your board has SATA drive capability, I doubt there will be any issues with a large drive, especially only a 150gig drive. (still a pretty small drive by todays standards!)
One thing to check is the drive and controller SATA I or SATA II.
If the drive is SATA II and the controller is SATA I, some drives you must set a jumper on the back of them to make them work with the slower SATA I controller.

But I bet maybe your issue is this......

Make sure when you install windows to the new drive, you have all your other drives unhooked. ESPECIALLY the drive with the OS on it now, it will cause you all sorts of problems later if you do get the install done on the new drive, and leave the old drive with Windows on it plugged in while you did the install. Once the install is done, rehook your other drives.

Or you can simply download the free trial version of Acronis True Image and mirror the contents of your current 36 gig drive over to the 150 gig drive. Acronis will do it in a heartbeat, very fast and very easy to use.

And lastly, if the drive does not spin up when you plug in power to it, there is something wrong. I take it you did not buy this drive new? Could be that the drive is simply bad. The BIOS would have nothing to do with it, if you apply power to it, press the start button on your case, it should spin up instantly.

 

[sub mesa]

You need at least XP SP1 for LBA 48-bit support, which is required for disks larger than 128GiB (or 137 "GB"). BIOS support is not necessary, unless you want to boot from a second partition.

 

[Paperdoc]

You need at least XP SP1 for LBA 48-bit support, which is required for disks larger than 128GiB (or 137 "GB"). BIOS support is not necessary, unless you want to boot from a second partition.

Not quite right. 48-bit LBA Support must be present in the hard drive, in its controller, and in the OS. In this particular case OP has a SATA drive, and ALL SATA systems (including drives and controllers) include 48-bit LBA Support, so that's not the trouble. I checked the mobo manual link from r_manic and the SATA controllers ARE part of the mobo's chipset. You are quite right, though, that SP1 or later is required with Win XP.

OP says he wants to use the 150 GB drive as his new C: boot drive. That means he must either do a new install of Win XP Pro on it, or clone the original to it using something like Acronis True Image. If he takes route #1, new install, two sub-branches can happen. If his Windows Install Disk is the original version, it can create and install on a Primary Partition of 128 GB (Microsoft's counting method), leaving about 10 GB as Unallocated Space. If his Install Disk already has SP1 or later included, this limit will not apply.

However, just to get to use the disk at all, there are wrinkles to be addressed. Windows does not know how to use SATA drives natively. It can use them AFTER installation if it has drivers added, but that still does not allow it to load from a SATA drive. Alternatively, when you are first installing Win XP Pro, at the screen where it asks you to push F6 (I think) to load special drivers, you can do this if you already have the SATA drivers available on a FLOPPY disk (Windows only can load these from the floppy). The better solution many mobo makers devised, though, requires that you set the BIOS properly. Many of these systems offer a BIOS setting for a SATA drive that Emulates an IDE (aka PATA) drive. This has the BIOS intervene and control the SATA drive, making it look to all the world (including Windows) just like a normal PATA drive, and it all works. But you must choose the PATA Emulation mode - not native SATA, not AHCI, not RAID.

In this particular case, though, OP assures us that, by viewing through a window, he is sure the drive never even spins up! Huge clue, here. No software or drivers can fix this. I'd suggest he go to the WD website and download their tools for diagnostic testing of their hard drives. Usually it will need to be installed on a bootable floppy or a bootable CD-ROM drive. You boot from that drive into a mini-DOS and run the test routines to see if the hard drive has flaws. Hopefully that will point to the real problem.

 

[scsi]

I have an intel motherboard D875PBZ. I use a WD 36GB 10,000rpm sata hard drive for the operating system and such. There is a scsi array used to store video clips. I am using windows XP Professional. I received a WD 150GB 10,000rpm sata raptor X. I want to use this drive in place of the 36GB drive.

When I pluged it in and tried to reload Windows I only get have way through the install and when it is time for windows to load it's files the computer reboots and starts at the begining.

I tried this drive on another machine with the same result. When I go into setup the drive is listed. It can be formated. I built this machine in 2003~. The other computer is older also.

I had to do a Bios recovery to get the computer back to where it was with the old drive. HERE IS THE QUESTION DOES ANY ONE KNOW IF THIS MOTHERBOARD ( or more to the point the Bios)HAS A LIMIT ON HOW BIG A DRIVE IT WILL SUPPORT? Intel does not have support anymore and I haven't been able to find information about drive limitations. I do not beleive the drive is defective. More information:When I load the bios with the 36GB drive in place I can feel the drive rotate. When I load the Bios with the 150GB drive, the drive does not rotate (it has a window to see in).

Thanks

Thanks for the link it was one I did not find. It didn't say anything about hard drive size. But from the other posts it seems the disk size should not be the problem.

The drive does spin when power up. It is a sata I.

Here is what I am doing. With the computer off I replace the 36GB drive with the 150GB drive. Windows XP Pro CD is in the dvd drive. The computer is turned on :

-- When I do this with the 36GB drive in place after startup I get a blinking curser for a few seconds then it states .....Press any key to boot from the cd... then it states that it is checking the system and goes on from there. Everything loads fine.--

With the 150GB drive in place after startup from the curser blinking it goes right into checking the system........
As it continues everything seems to be going fine the array is recognized the 150GB drive is being formatted. When it comes time for the CD to restart the computer to continue the install it would go back to the beginning and start again.

Major update as I was writing this updated post I was trying to load windows on the new drive. This way I could let you know where the differences occurred. WELL, there wasn't any, everything loaded just as it did when the 36GB drive was used during windows installation.

While it is great that everything works, I still would like to know what the cause was for so many failures over the previous days. I didn't do anything different this time than I did before. I tried an install on two computers with the 150GB drive with the same result, failure. While the 36GB drive worked. This is why I thought it was about the 150GB drive, it was the only change made to the procedure.

Why did it work this time? Last night I thought that maybe the windows install CD was at fault. But it would load just fine with the 36GB drive on the 1st computer and the failure of the 150GB drive and the success of the 36GB drive was the same on the other computer.

Thank you for your time, and the information you provided, I did learn things from each input. I will keep trying to figure out why it worked this time and what could have been different.

Any thoughts let me know.