My main HD is an 80GB Seagate, and I have a 200GB Samsung slaved to it. The first time I installed the 200GB HD, I read up extensively on BigLBA support to surpass the 137GB limit. I had read that using some of the easy "fixes" floating around the internet can unlock support, but may cause corruption on data stored after the 137GB mark. After more research, I gathered that the only "safe" way to do things was to install WinXP SP2. I did this, then went about filling the 200GB Samsung up completely. All was well until I tried reformatting. After reformatting (to a clean, non-SP2 copy of WinXP) I realized that much of the data on the 200GB had become corrupted. What I'm wondering is--is this because I had the Samsung drive installed after reformatting (ie, would it have worked if I'd removed that drive until after I'd reinstalled SP2)? Or is it possible to have corruption even under normal circumstances? I'm kind of afraid to fill this drive up again, lest the new data I copy to it become corrupted as well. My questions are: Why do you think this happened, would reformatting with a slipstreamed SP2 copy of WinXP fix this, or would removing the drive until SP2 is installed after a reformat fix this as well?
My Win XP2 is slipstreamed and i recently setup a 320GB disk in XP with no problem. I formatted it with the Administrative Tools accessed via Control Panel (had hooked the 320gigger up as slave and setup this way as none of my utils were new enough to do it properly; otherwise i'd have cloned my old hard drive and been done with it; however it was time for a reinstall anyway).
Hm, yeah, but did you fill it yet? My 200GB Drive was fine (no corruption) while I stayed under the 137GB mark... The way it happened was, directly before the reformat, I copied all my stuff from my 80GB drive onto the 200GB, surpassing the 137GB mark and filling it up entirely. I immediately reformatted after that, and then the files were all corrupted. So what I'm wondering is, what did it? Was it installing non-SP2 WinXP with the drive in? Or was the data already corrupted as soon as I broke the 137GB barrier?
yup, i've filled a lot of it, and have used the drive for dual-boot of Mandriva Linux too; it's 100% fine..
@DJ_Yuz: If you had disconnected the 200gig drive prior to the reinstallation, and upped to SP2, then put the drive back in, you would have been fine. When XP booted (without SP2), it checked the drive and handled it the only way it knew how......as 137 gig. Everything above that was irrelevant to XP. It probably rewrote the MFT which is what corrupted your data. ~Rich
I dunno i have large drives and i reinstall regularly and i've never had them go wrong why not partition it to 2 100 gig partions windows will read them as seperate harddrives
DoubleDwn: Thanks, I'll remove it in the future. PCRepair, thanks for the advice, I'll consider partitioning my larger drives from now on.
