I can use a 5 TB HDD in XP - how is that possible?

[Snear]

Today, I put a 5 TB HDD drive in my SATA drive enclosure (no USB involved) and I was a little surprised that I can actually use it, because I always thought it is not possible. I tried it out a long time ago and it did not work.

I formatted the drive as NTFS and was able to copy data back and forth. I ran "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo" from the command line and a sector size of 2048 Bytes was reported. I googled for such an odd sector size and could not find a single result. By the way - the hdd is a 2,5" Seagate BarraCuda Compute 5TB.

I checked a another drive. Toshiba MQ03ABB300. 3 TB. Fully accessible. Reported sector size: 1024 Bytes?!?! What is going on?

I did not yet try to fill the entire to check if I can write beyond 2 TB, but I used a disc editor (wxHexEditor) and modified a some bytes at the last sectors. They are saved just fine. wxHexEditor shows the same sector sizes. 2048 Bytes for the 5 TB drive, 1024 Bytes for the 3 TB drive.

I cannot use these drive on Windows 7 (they are determined as unformatted) and all my other installations of Windows XP just show the usual behaviour when plugging in drives with more than 2 TB. It's just this one Windows XP Pro installation, which magically handles these drives perfectly. Can someone solve this riddle for me? Did I install some kind of special tool and just can't remember?

I attached some screenshots. Whatever it is - I want it on every of my WinXP Pro computers...

[Snear]

BTW, it's MBR partition style.Here a property screenshot from the disk management tool.

[win32]

What versions of disk.sys and partmgr.sys do you have? Are there other drivers attached to the large disk in device manager?

[Dibya]

check your classpnp.sys

[dencorso]

3 hours ago, Snear said:

Today, I put a 5 TB HDD drive in my SATA drive enclosure (no USB involved) and I was a little surprised that I can actually use it, because I always thought it is not possible.

What exactly is your "SATA drive enclosure" (= Model, Manufacturer) and how is it connected to the machine, since it's not via USB?

[Snear]

6 hours ago, win32 said:

What versions of disk.sys and partmgr.sys do you have? Are there other drivers attached to the large disk in device manager?

disk.sys is 5.1.2600.5597 (xpsp_sp3_qfe.080507-1306)
partmgr.sys is 5.1.2600.5512 (xpsp.080413-2108)

No other drivers. The versions are the exactly the same for my two other installations of Win XP Pro, but those do not recognize the disk as 5TB.

[Snear]

5 hours ago, Dibya said:

check your classpnp.sys

classpnp.sys is 5.1.2600.5512 (xpsp.080413-2108)

It's the same for all my XP installations.

[Snear]

3 hours ago, dencorso said:

What exactly is your "SATA drive enclosure" (= Model, Manufacturer) and how is it connected to the machine, since it's not via USB?

Sorry, it might have been the wrong english word. It is just a drive bay, directly connected to the SATA port, which allows me to hot-swap the drive. https://de.sharkoon.com/product/12640

There is no additional controller, so I am pretty sure I get the same results if I attach the disk directly to the SATA port of the mainboard.

[caliber]

45 minutes ago, Snear said:

so I am pretty sure I get the same results if I attach the disk directly to the SATA port of the mainboard.

[Tripredacus]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is using a controller. You should be able to find it in Device Manager. Look at the properties of the Disk. On details tab, if there is a "parent" property, this will be the Hardware ID of the controller that the disk is connected to. Then you can find the controllers in the IDE Controllers or Storage Controllers section on Device Manager.

[jaclaz]

"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo"

And you posted everything BUT the output of that command.

2048 or 1024 make no sense (talking of sector size) maybe what you got is another piece of data, size of cluster, not size of sector  or maybe something else?.

Besides posting the actual output of that command, post the partition table of that disk, that is the easiest way to check the data.

jaclaz

 

 

 

[dencorso]

5 hours ago, Snear said:

Sorry, it might have been the wrong english word. It is just a drive bay, directly connected to the SATA port, which allows me to hot-swap the drive. https://de.sharkoon.com/product/12640

There is no additional controller, so I am pretty sure I get the same results if I attach the disk directly to the SATA port of the mainboard.

Now... that's a beauty! A translating adaptive 2-disk docking station! Of course there's  electronic "intellligence" built into it! https://de.sharkoon.com/Download/Storage_Solutions/Docking_Stations/SATA_QuickPort_Intern_Multi/datasheet_sata_quickport_intern_multi_en.pdf

On 10/25/2017 at 6:42 PM, rloew said:

No one is imposing 4KB Native Drives. I have never seen one. Only SCSI supports them. All AF Drives are 512e. USB Enclosure Manufacturers decided to make 4K translating adapters as a stopgap for XP users.
Microsoft had no part in that. Microsoft as already completely abandoned XP so they are not going to add new support. Forget about

[bphlpt]

@Snear, you say that those disks "work" on the one "magical" XP system, but don't on the other XP systems or on Win7. When you try them on those other systems, do you move the sharkoon drive bay to those other systems, or do you connect the drives to those other systems in some other manner?

Cheers and Regards

[Snear]

1 hour ago, jaclaz said:

"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo"

And you posted everything BUT the output of that command.

2048 or 1024 make no sense (talking of sector size) maybe what you got is another piece of data, size of cluster, not size of sector  or maybe something else?.

Besides posting the actual output of that command, post the partition table of that disk, that is the easiest way to check the data.

jaclaz

 

 

 

I don't know how to save the mbr. I just attached a file with the first 512 bytes from that drive. Please let me know if there is more I can do.

mbr.dat

[Snear]

1 hour ago, dencorso said:

Now... that's a beauty! A translating adaptive 2-disk docking station! Of course there's  electronic "intellligence" built into it! https://de.sharkoon.com/Download/Storage_Solutions/Docking_Stations/SATA_QuickPort_Intern_Multi/datasheet_sata_quickport_intern_multi_en.pdf

I removed the docking station an attached the drive directly to the SATA port. Works perfectly. I think the logic build into the docking station is only for the hdd led and the on/off switch, but I can remove the circuit board and post a picture of the front side if you insist. :-)