200GB Harddrive PROBLEM

[PCTech]

Alright, After a hard day and I tried changins some stuff around on my desktop well need less to say I was starting out switching the 30gb hd to a 120gb harddrive (leaving the 200 gb one in there). So the 30gb had the OS and all on it, so that ment I had to reinstall it again, So I got an error "Operating System Error" on bootup and it would go NO further! Thats not my problem (well not the one I am concerned about)

My question I went in and tried to take off EZ-DRIVE off of the 200gb harddrive because partition magic wouldn't touch the stupid thing and I was trying to to some stuff in there! So I got the Maxtor MaxBlast4 thing and loaded it up on a floppy and booted, tried to uninstall ezdrive and surprise it wont installed!!! so either Partition Magic is crazy or i'm stupid, so I changed the LBA Default setting from 3880***** something to start with a 6 something, or whatever it was and it changed it to the recommended LBA! So I put back the 30 as the master and 200 as the slave and 120 as secondary slave, and now the issue:

the 200 GB harddrive is only 31.48GB! HOW do you fix that? and How do you fix the OS System Error right after it does the "copying files to harddrive to continue with install of windows XP"?

HELP

~PCT

[moen]

There are many possibilities
I have never had good luck with Maxtor MaxBlast
Are you mixing IDE and SATA hard drives??
Is your chipset more than 2 years old?
If you add up all the regognized hard drive space, does it add up to 137.4 gig of actual space???
How did you set up your original drives?...with MSdos or PCdos bootdisk?
hopefully you reformatted or disconnected the original 30gig with the old OS.

Are the individual hard drives set correctly to master, slave, single master, etc...for example with Western Digital disk, if you have a master hard drive and one or more slaves, the master has to be set as "master with slave". If you then disconnect the slave(s) you have to reset the master to "single master". We have 4 computers with about 10hard drives between them and I like Western Digital drives, but they are more finicky about settings than say Maxtors or Seagates.

You should disconnect the other drives while you try to install the OS on the 120 GIG drive.
If you partitioned with WinXP diskmanager, you have to make the disk a basic disk, and not a dynamic disk, because you cannot install any OS on a dynamic disk partitioin.
Need to know a bit about what mobo and other hard ware.
I have had my share of problems installing OS's.
ALso, if you have more than one optical drive on one IDE controller, then sometimes Windows will only install from the master optical drive.

[PCTech]

Alright, An8xe deluxe amd athlon 2800+..I'll have to check the Master and Slave Settings on the drives, I think the USB one is 60gb, 200 gb which shows as 30gb or so, the 120gb one is 50gb or so? so wtf is going on here? I'll check the master and slave settings and come back

[PCTech]

ok OS is installed, however, the 120gb drive is detected as 114gb, and the 200gb one is 31.48gb around there....so thats about 145gb?...please help, how do you reset the lba value?

[rikytik]

I've had several incidents where Parition Magic wouldn't do it's magic. Pretty much moved over to Acronis, but have generally used Maxblast for the initial set up. Just before moving, 2 of my Maxtor's started having disk errors and I don't know if I'll be able to recover them. Haven't unpacked my desktop yet. Still using this wonderful 1.5 lb. Sony T 140P, hooked up to my LCD 18" monitor.

Sorry, no ideas to contribute, other than to get away from PQ PM. Let you know if I get into a jumble with my Maxtors in a day or two. 160 and 120 as I recall.

[PCTech]

alright, acronis is what i've heard to be better than PM8. So what acronis product do I need to use to do this? Which one will allow me to change back the LBA setting and all that stuff, because when I changed that it changed the Disc Size! Maybe I should call maxtor? which I would really prefer to fix it myself! Any help is appreciated!

BTW, can you run SATA and IDE harddrives in the same computer? What about a conversion cable from IDE to SATA? Just a couple of thoughts, thanks everyone so far

~PCT

[Dudelive]

Well first...Does the Bios reconize the drive as the correct size?
If not....go in Bios and be sure LBA is enabled.
Also be sure to set bios to "auto detect"
If it was enabled, then you may have to remove the cmos battery to clear the previous settings from the other drives.
Then connect ONLY the drive in question to the primary with it set as single drive.
Upon booting it should be reconized as the true size by bios.

There are several other people having the same problem, just google search

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=maxtor+hard+drive+wrong+si ze&btnG=Google+Search

Thanks
Dudelive

[PCTech]

already checked, the lba and jumper settings Also the cmos settings wouldn't have anything to do with it, so taking the battery out wouldn't work . So....After bootup the drive is recognized as a 203GB harddrive and in windows it only says 30.41 or 31.48 or something like that!

Thanks for all the ideas, I used that damn maxblast 4 and changed one of the settings for the default LBA size or something? should I write zeros to it? how about fdisk /mbr? with just the 200gb hd connected? I really dont want to write zero's to it as I would lose ALL of my stuff (even though the partition's have been deleted by maxblast) at least at that rate I could run a partition recovery program and get my stuff back! I need some help big time

[Raid762]

If your bios is detecting the drive as 200gb then it sounds like you may have created your partition incorrectly .
If you have got XP running on your system right click 'my computer/MANAGE' and select disk management. You should see your current drive configuration , with perhaps a 30gb partition and lots of free space.Try using this tool to reconfigure the drive if this is the case.
As for data recovery , I have just been through something like this after replacing my motherboard a couple oy my partitions dissappeared , after recreating a partition on the blank space and formatting I used 'Recover my Files 3.06' and recovered most of the stuff that was there, although I had to do a lot of sorting to identify what I had recovered.

[PCTech]

alright, just checked the drive in XP, it says 30gb unallocated, so I partitioned it and there is nothing else left to partition! I know it is a 200gb drive because it was before I screwed with it with maxblast! anyone know how to fix this?

when I find out how to fix it I will post a step by step on how to fix it for anyone else that might have this problem!

~PCT

edit:

running check disk on it now....will report with results