Abit AI7 & 1 TB HDD

Easy part first. It didn't show up in Win2000 file management because there is no formatted partition. This is fine for now. If you want to have some pointless fun, format the 128 GB partition you see in File Manager and then see the drive.

But you have a more important issue, that "partition option is disabled for this drive in the disk management section." I have a couple of suggestions.

NOTE: there is no data on that disk that you need, right? It's empty, new, unused, and all those things? Otherwise we have to get more careful!

1) Hit it with a hammer. Very satisfying, eliminates the need for any further work.

2) Failing that, can you post a description or picture (you have to serve the picture somewhere else, like photobucket, and post a link) of what the Disk Manager shows for this drive? And any message about why you can't partition it? I'm hoping you've got another 800GB of usable space there somewhere.

3) Download one of the many excellent hobbyist partitioning tools and try partitioning the disk with that. EASEUS gives away the basic version of their partition manager in the hope that you will buy the full version. There are many other worthy candidates out there; I just don't have any in my tool box at the moment. Repartition with that, format with that, and off you go.

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This is the first time that you have attached an SATA drive to this motherboard, yes? I am talking totally off the top of my head here, but did you enable "enhanced mode" for the PATA controller or for the SATA controller? I'm too lazy to download and read your BIOS manual at the moment. I would think that SATA configuration and EIDE configuration would be at least different areas on the same page, and want to make sure that you get the right one. I dont' recall "enhanced" being an option for SATA configuration, just "IDE", "AHCI", and "RAID".

Finally, or maybe first, how recently have you updated your BIOS and your win2K drivers? 2k is a fairly old OS. I honestly don't know what the disk, partition, and file size limits were. You might peek at http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_si... (boy, am I lazy today!).

Ahh - here's a note from 2007 that may be obsolete by now. How big are your PATA drives?
"The reason is Windows 2000 can only recognise upto 137GB Capacity
Barrier is also known as 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for
ATA (IDE), Serial ATA or ATAPI disc drives. The 137GB limitation does
not affect SCSI interface disc drives.
Octek has updated all BIOSes to support 48-bit LBA since 2002 (Code
2K300 or later); however, in order to properly access the full
capacity of an ATA interface hard drive larger than 137GB, your system
must meet the system requirements described below. There are three
general methods of support:
As such you are required to partition your HDD into more manageable
portions, alternatively you can upgrade to WIndows 2003

Subject: Re: Disk Size - Windows 2000
From: jiangsheng-ga on 29 Mar 2006 11:23 PST

48-bit Logical Block Addressing(LBA) is supported in Windows 2003,
Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 SP4. However, sometimes it is not
enabled by default.
See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013"


Can someone with more recent experience give this nice person a definitive answer so s/he doesn't have to listen to me ramble any more?