160G Seagate Hard drive problem?

Question

i have bought a seagate 160GB hard drive. i divided it to four NTFS partitions: 30G, 40G, 40G, 40G. But the last partition cannot be formatted. Someone told me old mainboard cannot support large hard drive. So i download the newest bios of the motherboard and try but nothing improved. I wonder if it's the motherboard or hard drive's problem. anyone could help? THANK YOU SO MUCH!! harddrive: seagate 160GB 8MB buffer, 7200rpm, barracuda 7200.9, Mainboard: asus p4ge-v

Anyone could tell what is the maximum hard drive capacity support of i845GE chipset ICH4 (it's my mainboard's chipset) ? I go to intel's any it tells nothing. Thanks again.

Answer 1

WTF, Someone told you WRONG. unless your running a REALLLLLLLLLLLY old system, your able to put damn near all hard drive sizes in. The problem that occurs is not from the motherboard, but from the operating system itself. What you want to do to get the whole deal, is if your running windows xp home/pro, is that you go to microsoft's site, and download Service Pack 2... (for bigger drives of today), also you could get yourself a copy of Ghost or PQDI, Partition Magic. You'll probably have a 127gb limit when you try to install it. Which is fine for now, you'll need to just install SP2. ---on SP2, there's A LOT OF UPDATES. I've seen people who sit there and download 4 files and think that's sp2. Whenever I did an upgrade for someone, it was like 50-70 files total. Don't use Windows Update to do it, download it manually and run it. Anyways, windows would see it as a large drive now. You can either use Partition Magic or Ghost to setup the hard drive to be a full 160gb if you already partitioned it, or use windows built on one, but I've seen it where window's built-on one doesn't work well sometimes. Then it should work. I have the same hard drive, 160gb Seagate. That's what I did.

Answer 2

Good day. If u have a windowx XP Setup CD home or pro and in the setup itself u may reach a page called partitioning information. The last one has partitioning information made by XP and that cannot be touched so your problem may be right there. I suggest u do it over and make 5 partitions. The xp partition with the information just takes up 7MB. So make like a 30, 40,40 & 33. Again u can see this and do this if u have the windows XP Setup disk. This will involve loss of information so i suggest u back up yur stuff b4 doing this. Laterz!

Answer 3

What software are you using to format the partition ... are you trying to do it from within Windows (that may be the problem).

I suggest you try a third party program to format the drive. This one is similar to Partition Magic but is 100% free :

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/

Boot up with this program & go from there.

regards,
Philip T

Answer 4

Hard drives over 135GB need Windows XP SP1 or later. The motherboard must also support 48 bit LBA. Most motherboards made in past few years have 48 bit LBA support.

Answer 5

I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems.
Some drive problems can be easily fixed by yourself using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required.

Answer 6

No reason why you shouldnt be able to do it, might need to start all over and delete the partitions and repartition all over this time starting with NTFS and making each volume dynamic..