Operating system that affects the normal use of large capacity hard drives

Hard drives are getting cheaper, especially for large-capacity hard drives, and their price/performance ratio is becoming more and more prominent. According to the author's observation, the current single-GB capacity of 250GB hard disk is less than 3 yuan. In the face of a hard disk that is cheaper than cabbage, are you heart-warming? Perhaps the answer is no, as long as it is caused by the motherboard chipset, they are not willing to buy a larger capacity hard drive to upgrade. In fact, the current restrictions on the use of large-capacity hard drives in addition to the BIOS and motherboard chipset, there is an important factor, that is the operating system.

Operating system support for large-capacity hard drives

Support for 48bit LBA mode (IDEal Interface Specification, LBA is the way most high-capacity hard drives access data today, it uses 48 bits to represent every location on the hard disk) to provide a large-capacity hard drive. stand by. Early Windows 95/Windows 98/98 SE/Me did not support 48-bit LBA mode, so it could not provide support for 137 GB or more. The disk management of Windows 98/98 SE operating system can only manage 64 GB hard disk, which exceeds this capacity. The hard drive will not be recognized. Its partitioning software Fdisk can also not correctly identify 64GB hard drives, so if you use it to partition, it will easily lead to identification errors, partition table confusion and so on. If you want to use the Windows 98/SE operating system, you can only use a special method to partition the large hard disk and then install the operating system. In this case, if the BIOS supports 48bit LBA mode, the system can recognize 137GB hard disk capacity, but it is easy to make mistakes during access. Therefore, it is recommended to install dual systems, using NTFS format for partitions after 64GB.

Although the Windows 2000/XP operating system supports 48bit LBA mode, it can correctly identify more than 137GB hard disk, but the support for 48bit LBA mode is not enabled by default. You need to install the patch after installing the operating system. Under normal circumstances, Windows 2000+SP4 and windows xp+SP1 can ensure the correct identification and use of the hard disk. In addition, even if Windows 2000 has patched SP1, check the version of Atapi.sys file under the system, because only version 5.1.2600.1135 can fully support 48-bit LBA. For Windows XP, Atapi.sys file should be version 5.1.2600.1152. Otherwise, there will be an overflow bug when accessing data larger than 137GB, causing damage. The most common case is that after writing a large amount of data (120GB or more), the partition is lost, or the response is lost during the copying of the data, and the partition is not formatted after the restart.

Since these two operating systems provide support for 137GB or more hard drives, we can use their CDs to partition large hard drives. The method is to use the installation CD to start the computer, then separate the hard disk into a zone to install the Windows 2000/XP operating system, and then patch the system first. Then use the system's own disk management tool to partition the remaining unpartitioned parts.

Operating system requirements for partitioning

Windows 98/98 SE/Me Due to disk management restrictions, the limitation on hard disk capacity is limited to 64GB, so when partitioning the hard disk, whether it is Multiple partitions or a single partition should have a combined hard drive capacity of no more than 64GB. For partitions other than 64GB capacity, the NTFS format can be used instead.

The Microsoft technical documentation also mentions the Windows 2000 requirements for partitioning. Although Windows 2000 is backward compatible with the FAT32 format and the FAT32 format supports 2000T hard drives, Windows 2000 does not provide support for FAT32 format partitions over 30GB. As long as the partition capacity exceeds 30GB and is in FAT32 format, Windows 2000 cannot recognize the excess capacity regardless of whether the partition is a C drive or another partition. For partition recognition in NTFS format, Windows 2000 does not have this problem. This point is also necessary to pay attention to the partition!!

Need to remind everyone, for the use of windows 2000/XP CD as a partitioning tool for 137GB or more hard disk partition, when the operating system crashes and reinstall the system when the thousand You can't access the last partition in the drive letter before installing the patch, otherwise it will easily cause data loss or partition table error.

Finally, I hope my friends can use their large capacity hard drive happily.