External USB Disk Drive question 1

[skippy2007uk]

Hi,

Im running Windows 2000 Server on fairly new DELL SC440 server. I'm aware of the Windows 2000 restriction of 127Gb on internal drives (the machine shipped with a 160Gb drive, but only allowed a 127Gb partition during OS setup).

I am looking at buying a 1TB external UBS2 disk drive. Will Windows 2000 Server recognise the full capacity of this disk?

Many thanks,
skip

 

[itsp1965]

It depends on how the drive is formatted to begin with. As long as it using standard NTFS formatting and not setup as a GPT formatted volume (which I had to reformat) you should be able to see the complete drive

 

[skippy2007uk]

Thanks for your reply. I will be formatting the entire drive as one partition as NTFS - so I should be ok then...

Thanks,
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[Lemon13]

what sp are u running, since sp4 the 137gb limit isnt anymore (unless ur bios isnt capable of 48bit aderessing)

 

[skippy2007uk]

I'm running SP4 - but I installed from a pre "service packed" CD.

I'm pretty certain the BIOS is ok with that as the machine is only a few months old.

Thanks,
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[TechyMcSe2k]

now that you are SP4, check your disk management GUI and see if it shows unused space. You can then use Diskpart (Windows built in tool) to extend the drive if need be.

 

[skippy2007uk]

ah cool, didn't know about DiskPart.

I had to add the "EnableBigLba" entry into the registry as this was not set - after doing that I could see the extra un-partitioned space.

And then DiskPart has extended the partition to use all available space (it was the primary boot partition as well, containing the pagefile - so was surprised DiskPart worked without complaining, as the knowledge base article I read suggested that it would not work on a partition containing a pagefile).

Anyhow, all seems to be working fine so thanks all for your advice - much appreciated!

Cheers,
skip

 

[skippy2007uk]

Just a quick follow on question...

Does anybody know the maximum size internal hard disk that Windows 2000 server SP4 will support?

Thanks,
skip

 

[TechyMcSe2k]

It depends on your hardware. What type of server hardware you run and its actual limits for internal disk drive space and the RAID that you configure. I dont believe Windows 2000 Server is limited by its software, except for the pre-SP4 137GB Boot partition limit.