My bios is Award Modular Bios v4.51PG on an Asus P2B-LS mobo. I have the 1014 Beta 003 bios patch installed. Works fine but doesn't include 48bitLBA. There seems to be a commercial upgrade to version 6.00 or something but I think it's not necessary (see below). I guess that the missing bios support is why just about all partitioning tools don't work. I've tried Free FDISK, SuperFdisk and some other mentioned in this thread. At best they showed big partitions correctly but they were not able to create them. None of them showed the harddisk size correctly. Anyway, I've installed the patch and tools from the BigHDD2.0 setup from post #56 (on my system drive which is small and scsi, so no problems there). Then used a Knoppix CD (live linux booting from cdrom) to create partitions on the 250GB Samsung disk (model SP2514N) and create a FAT32 filesystem in them. After some experiments I found why windows sometimes shows two driveletters for the same partition, one formatted and one seemingly unformatted. It turns out that windows likes just about any set of partitions as long as there are no primary partitions that start above the 128GiB limit. Extended/logical partitions can start anywhere, primaries that start below the limit can stretch across the limit and be bigger that 128GiB. For any primary starting beyond the limit windows will show a ghost driveletter. With that sorted I filled the drive (then one big primary partition) to the rim by copying some big files over and over again. There was no corruption at all. All data verified 100%. The copying was done partly by the normal explorer copy&paste functions, partly by an ancient version of FileSync and partly with xcopy calls in a batch file. No problems with any of them. Note that I haven't tried any copying in dosmode! So, once again thanx to LLXX for developing the patch!!! If anybody wants some input on how to partition/format with linux, let me know. It's just a few (relatively) simple commands but I don't want to fill this thread with off-topic info if nobody is interested. p.s. Scandskw and defrag from the BigHDD2.0 install work fine where the originals wouldn't even start because the disk was too big for them. To avoid problems I've disabled (renamed) all older versions of scandskw, defrag and don't forget chkdsk. Hopefully that will prevent windows from messing things up on a boot-time scan after a bad shutdown.