Topic: Trouble installing Windows to my new SATA drive

[W7RE]

I picked up a 500GB Western Digital SATA drive, and I'm having trouble with Windows setup. When I get to where I select which drive and partition I want to install Windows XP to, it shows the 500GB drive as 131GB. My motherboard's driver CD has a SATA driver installation on it, which may fix the problem. But if I need to boot into Windows to run the SAT driver, how do I install Windows to that drive?








Further details for those who feel like reading:

I've been running on IDE drives even though my mobo supports SATA. This new drive is SATA. At first I tried booting into a Windows install with 3 drives: IDE CDROM (slave 1), IDE 80GB (master 1), SATA 500GB. Windows drive/partition selection showed the 80GB as C, and the 500GB as D. (the 80GB did not have a previous Windows installation on it, it was previously my D drive.)

Originally I was going to use an external drive enclosure on another computer to attempt to mirror my old Windows installation onto the new SATA drive (at the suggestion of my dad), but that ended up being a long and convoluted process that didn't seem worth the time. Currently we''ve got the SATA drive and my old IDE C drive hooked up to another computer through an external drive enclosure, doing a "backup" from the old C drive to the new another 500GB SATA drive. (my dad bought 2 SATA drives identical to mine) That's creating a single backup file. Once that's done, we'll attempt to restore the backup to another of the new SATA drive. Hopefully this will give me a copy of my old Windows installation on my new drive and I can just boot onto that. Worst cast scenario I need to boot with the WinXP CD and repair the installation.

That all seems way too time consuming and convoluted though, so I decided to just try installing Windows fresh on the new SATA drive. that's where I ran into the problem of Windows only recognizing 131GB.

[Cobra951]

That's a limit of older hardware or software.  One thing you can do is create a smaller partition on the new drive (like 40 GB) and install Windows there.  Then the large remaining area would become the D: drive.  This is a generally good idea anyway, since it allows you to reformat C: and reinstall Windows at a later time without affecting the bulk of your data files.

[W7RE]

I was able to get windos installation to recognize the full size of the drive by creating a SATA/RAID driver disk from the CD and putting that in the floppy drive durign windows installation.

Unfortunately, now Ihave another problem. I just spent about 3 hours waitingf or windows to reformat and partition the drive to install windows, only to get a blue screen of death with the message "unmountable boot volume". I got the same thing earlier today when I tried to install on the partition I had created on the drive on another PC. I was hoping the problem was that it just didn't like the partition the other machine created, but even with a fresh one it's getting the same error again.

Currently I have:
A: floppy drive
C: 500GB SATA drive
D: CDROM drive

The BSOD occurs when the system finally tries to boot into windows for the first time. I see the black Windows XP loading screen with the loading bar, and then the BSOD.

[Cobra951]

I stand by what I said.  Trying to get all the low-level contingencies to address 500 GB may not be an easy process.  Creating a 40 GB partition, dealing with only that at the low level, then dealing with a 460 GB partition later, from higher-level software, is generally doable.

[W7RE]

Well, unless I use the floppy driver disk windows still only recognizes 131GB. So I'd have a  40GB partition and a 91GB partition.

Using the friver disk to recognize the full 500GB and giving myself 2 partitions of 40GB and 460GB, I guess my C drive would be smaller, but I'm not sure it would help much other than making any scans or wipes faster. I don't see that it would get rid of errors.

[scottws]

Actually, if you do what Cobra said and install Windows on a smallish partition (for XP I suggest 60-80 GB to fit the OS and many apps and games) and just leave the rest unpartitioned, you can install whatever drivers you need to help Windows detect the drive correctly.  Then you can use Windows' Disk Management MMC to create and format the remaining portion of the drive, which should be what you expect.

I might suggest looking for and installing a BIOS update.  That could be a contributing factor, because most modern boards should have that much trouble with drives over 130 GB.  If your board is five years old, then yeah I could see an issue.

[W7RE]

That worked, thanks guys. Sorry about being short with you guys, it was the frustration. I didn't anticipate a reformat taking me a day and a half.

I'm not completely happy with the route I had to go to get the drive working just because to me it feels messy and like a workaround, but the results are fine. It doesn't bother me to have the drive split into two, it's just that I feel like I couldn't get it to work properly or how I expected.

BTW, I don't think my motherboard is old enough for it to be the issue. It's an ASUS Crosshair, and the manual is dated July 2006.

[scottws]

I remember way back... like P1 days.  My dad and I upgraded our hard drive.  We had a similar issue.  We had to install some sort of bootloader so that the system could see the whole drive.  Splitting really wasn't an option then.  Firstly we didn't know how big the OS was and secondly that was at a time when space was at a premium.

But yeah I suggest having either two drives (on OS + apps and one data) or at least two partitions anyway.  That way you can avoid what Ghandi is going through right now.