Strange disk problem with WINXP

[chuka]

HI

I have a very strange problem I hope I can get some help from the group.
I have a machine AMD 1.33 (New motherboard) with Seagate 20GB H.G (ST320420A) (I have a two identical H.D's and both of them are facing the same problem)
WinME see the full 20GB HD and worked for a long time.
I have decided to upgrade to WinXP pro, I started with an upgrade, everything goes well until it boots for the first time, after XP displays the first winXP loading screen it dies getting the message, inaccessible_boot_device.
I decided to do a clean install, formatted the H.D from a boot diskette, I can see the full 20GB after format and boot.
Boot from CD and when It asked me to choose the drive I can see that winXP sees the drive as 8GB only, The BIOS setup is correct, I tried modifying the DMA setting in the BIOS, the PIO mode from AUTO to 0-4, changed the disk detection mode to CHS, LBA, AUTO, but the same, XP sees it as 8GB.

I took a Fujitsu 20GB H.D and XP sees it as 20GB.

I took a different computer, AMD XP 1700+, and had the same problem.

Seagate tech support is telling me it's a motherboard problem but they could explain me how it is working under winME, how come Fujitsu H.D is working, and how come I have the same problem on a different computer.

 

[chuka]

I did some more tests and was able to solve the problem, here is what I did:

1)Low level format.
2)Used Seagate DM to resize the reporting sectors of the disk to 2 GB.
3)Resize the disk back to what was recommended by DM, this was smaller than the original size.

Booted with winXP and the problem was solved.

 

[mufka]

I had that exact same problem and then I switched to a ATA100 80-wire cable and it was fixed.

 

[preechr]

I had the same problem. Turns out my MOBO bios were rather old and only recognized drives up to 8 Gbytes. I had to partition a 40 GB drive into five 8 Gig disks to see the full size. It actually worked out well, since I used each drive as an archive for different things. One drive is "Archives" another is "Music", another is "Photos", etc. Of course, the C drive is where the OS resides.

You can use partition magic v. 7 to change partition sizes, but max is 8 gig on some bios. Mine are circa 1995 even though the MOBO is 1998. Hope this helps.