[AccessD] Using a 160mb hard disk

John,

You could always add in a new EIDE controller card that supports drives
>128GB.

I always leave a small fat32 partition so that I can run Ghost and the like.

Bobby


-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John Colby
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 9:08 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: RE: [AccessD] Using a 160mb hard disk


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

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