windows displays incorrect disk sizes

[janimal666]

pentium4 2.4ghz
abit sa7 motherboard 533mhz bus
disks: 40gb(ok), maxtor.160Gb(shown as 128Gb), west.dig.200Gb(shown as 128Gb)

the sizes of all the above disks are displayed correctly in bios, but winxp (disk management) and partition magic only see 128Gb space on each of the large disks. the 160Gb disk has been low level formatted and the 200Gb disk is factory fresh. any suggestions?

 

[Freestone]

I don't mean to offend, just want to be sure. In Disk Management, lower-pane left side, is it showing Disk 0 and Disk 1 sizes correctly, i.e. something like 152GB and 186GB? This is different from the 128GB partition sizes. I ask because if the drive sizes are not being reported correctly, you are definitely headed for data corruption if you manage to resize the partitions in DOS. XP must show the correct drive sizes in order for it to manage them correctly.

 

[janimal666]

disk manager displays 128Gb disk with a 128Gb partition.

 

[Freestone]

Since all prerequisites for 48-bit LBA have been met and XP is still not seeing the drive sizes correctly, I again suggest slipstreaming SP2 and reinstalling XP, or at least reinstall up to the point where it shows drives to install to - there you should see if the slipstreamed XP recognizes proper drive sizes.

Perhaps someone else has another idea or sees something we missed.

 

[janimal666]

ok. i went into partition magic dos mode and found the unpartitioned space was visible there. it was not possible to resize the partitions, only to delete and recreate them. so, having two disks with duplicate data i went through the following sequence:

1 delete partition on 160 drive in dos partition magic and create newe to full size of drive
2 reboot to windows where disk size is now fine, run chkdsk in windows partition magic, shows no errors
3 copy data from 200 drive to 160 drive
4 repeat steps 1 and 2 on 200 disk

when i came to the last pass of copying the data from 160 to 200, i got the error message 'cannot copy, path is too deep'. i got this message when i tried to get a big file off 160 drive before starting the sequence, but didn't worry about it as the file wasn't critical. it seems to mean that i cannot copy off the resized drives file by file or en masse although i can access the data fine. the maximum path depth in the data is six folders deep from the drive letter, and has never given me any hassle before...

 

[Freestone]

I'm glad to hear you got the drive sizes recognized, though I guess I'll never understand how deleting a partition magically makes the entire drive size available again.

What were you using to copy data? Drag and drop? You could try xcopy or the much more versatile xxcopy at

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

A quick check on path too deep seems to indicate it is a general error message. A long thread is here:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/archive/2004/08/30/23742.aspx

 

[janimal666]

yes i was using drag/drop. thanks for the codebetter link, freestone! i went into the device manager, where i see 3 network devices. one is my modem, one is a pci network card and one is the onboard network device on the motherboard. i went into properties /advanced on my pci network device, because its the only one with an advanced tab, and turned the link speed to 100 full. hey presto, all data seems to be copying and moving fine. i'll have to test this a bit, but it all looks cool for now. very strange, as my machine hasn't been hooked up to a network over a year, and i don't see what it should have to do with data transfer between two ide devices, but then i am a mere mortal. the path is too deep looks like a many faceted world of pain judging by that thread, but then thats computing all round. at least you can shoot a horse!