Re: 120 Gig HD Limit and Win XP upgrade

eDawg wrote:
> I currently have a Windows 2000 Pro System with an 80 Gig Hard disk as the
> primary and a 250 Gig as the secondary. The secondary disk is only seen as
> a 120 Gig disk and from what I read this is a limitation of Windows that
> was fixed in Windows XP Service Pack 1.

I've never heard of that limitation.
It sounds more like the 137 GB BIOS
limitation. You may want to research
that to arrive at a definitive answer.
Hard drive manufacturers usually have
info on their websites about that sort
of thing. That is where I would start.

> I am going to upgrade the system to Windows XP Sp 2 using the upgrade CD.

Why? With older hardware 2000 works better
(is more responsive).

> But I also want to upgrade the primary Hard Disk to a 250 Gig Disk.

Okay. Again, look into the possibility of
a 137 GB BIOS limitation. Up until just
recently I was using a 2001 vintage Shuttle
mainboard that had that limitation and no
manufacturer-provided BIOS update. The
last setup was a 320 GB drive and a 400 GB
drive. To get around the limitation I ran
one drive on a PCI IDE expansion card and
the other with an overlay (aka Dynamic Drive
Overlay). Neither solution required XP.
The rest of the system hardware was: a 900
MHz Athlon processor and 1 GB of 100 MHz
SDRAM. The mainboard, processor and memory
was given to me in 2003. In those days there
was a rash of mainboards that had defective
filter capacitors (http://www.badcaps.net/)
The bad capacitors caused frequent lockups.
I changed out all of the effected capacitors
and used the mainboard, processor and memory
for close to 5 years. Now I'm running a 2004
setup and the above setup is helping others
learn about computers at the non-profit school
I attend.

> I think I am painting myself into a corner here. If I put in a brand new
> Disk for the primary and I try to use the Win XP SP2 upgrade CD will the
> upgrade process fail?

Probably. Upgrade means just that.
On the other hand, I forget. Just
having the 2000 disk may be enough.
Again, the drive limitation is not
a good reason to change to XP.

> I own the original Windows 2000 Pro Installation CD. Will the Win XP
> Upgrade CD be happy to see that CD or is it going to be demanding some
> traces of Win 2000 on the Hard Disk?

I forget. I believe that having the disk
is enough--but I may be wrong. If it were
me, I'd look to other solutions and not
look to the installation of XP to solve
your problem.

> Thanks!

Bill Eitner