[AccessD] Using a 160mb hard disk

John Colby jcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Sep 22 08:07:41 CDT 2003


It's all over now, but not resolved the way I had intended nor wanted.

My intention was to install the 160gb drive, carve out about 40g for the OS
and Program Files, and use the other 120g for data.  the problem I
immediately ran into is that Windows 2K simply doesn't understand drives
larger than ~135 gb.  Windows put support into SP3 so IF you happen to have
a copy of Win2K SP3, i.e. the Windows 2K installation disks WITH SP3 already
installed (and it appears they are available) then you would probably never
run into the problems I encountered.

I wanted to use the install disk to partition and format the drive.  That
simply failed.  The install SAID it was formatting a 120gb partition (my
first sign of trouble) but after 2 hours of formatting this behemoth, it
failed saying the disk was corrupted or damaged (or some such).

Sigh.  And the weekend is shot to hell.

I tried using Maxstore's excellent max blast - that didn't work.

I went to Samsung's site (the HD manufacturer) and found a similar program.
Used it to create partitions.  That seemed to work, could be seen etc but
was now loading a multiboot manager before Windows, which isn't enough of a
problem all by itself not to use it.  However some programs were now failing
(Norton utilities?  Don't remember.)

I ended up (after HOURS AND HOURS of dicking around trying this that and the
other) downloading a shareware program called BootitNG.  This program
correctly partitioned the disk.  I then ran Win2K SP4 from my EXISTING 15gb
partition on my 40Gb original hard disk which could now see the partitions
(but said unknown size).  I ran a quick format on both 80 g partitions
(that's what I decided on since the disk would be data only) and Windows2K
was now happy with these two partitions, I.e. I could read / write to them.

I then moved all the data from my 2 old data partitions of the 40g drive,
deleted these partitions, and used BootitNG to resize the remaining boot
partition so that Win2K and Program Files has the entire 40g drive and my
data all resides on the two 80g partitions.

An entire day shot screwing around with this.  Had I known what I was facing
I would have simply bought a 120g drive that Windows could just understand
and been done with it.

8-(

And yes, I also use NTFS everywhere.

John W. Colby
www.colbyconsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Drew Wutka
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2003 11:50 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: RE: [AccessD] Using a 160mb hard disk


Are you trying to install to the full 160 gig?  If so, don't do that JC.
Create a 4, 6, or 8 gig partition, and install the OS to that.  Preferably
install software to another partition (on another drive if possible.), and
then create a 'Data' partition.

The smaller OS partition size may sound like folklore, but there are reasons
for everything.  In the Root drive case, when you 'format' a drive, it
builds a 'Table of Contents' for the drive.  (If you look at a drive with
Windows 2000, which is completely blank/freshly formatted, you'll see that
several megs are already used, that's the partition info.  The larger the
partition, the bigger that database is going to be, and on top of that, the
more time it takes to find things.  (Indexing on a larger database is
slower, right?).

Also, I have talked to a few developers, here and there, and have found that
many are using FAT32 drives, instead of NTFS.  I HIGHLY recommend that
everything get's set to NTFS, that can be.  There are utilities available
(free ones) that you can install on 9x OSes, that enable them to read NTFS,
which eliminates the only concern of using NTFS.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: John Colby [mailto:jcolby at colbyconsulting.com]
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 8:39 PM
To: AccessD
Subject: [AccessD] Using a 160mb hard disk


The hard disk on my server (a 40gb maxtor) was filled up, so I bought a
160gb drive for $120 at Newegg.  It seems that Windows 2K cannot use any
disk larger than 135gb until SP3.  Which begs the question, how do you
install Win2K base on a disk it can't use correctly?

I tried a simple install, and it tries to do a format but fails saying the
disk is corrupted.  I'm now trying to use the original server system updated
to SP3 to format the disk, but even assuming that I manage that, It seems
unlikely that I will persuade the Win2K setup disk to recognize the existing
/ formatted partition given that the setup disk is not at SP3.

Is there any way to install Windows on a second drive while already running
Windows?  Is there any way around this or do I simply have to live with
booting up with the 40g drive and using the 160 g drive as pure storage once
I get SP3 installed and the registry hack done?

John W. Colby
www.colbyconsulting.com


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