Raid & Ide Controllers With Harddrive Over 137gb

[dinosaur-jr]

Hello Friends,

Some advise for those of you who use IDE Controllers or Raid Controllers with Harddisk over 137GB connected in Windows XP even SP2 with native XP drivers for controller card

Some time ago, i started to experience strange problems with some of my harddisks, where data was getting corrupted, because of corrupted MBR.

Some examples:

Movies where either not viewable anymore (Files still present, same size) or contained crosslinks to other files (e.g. movie Troy is showing Shark Tale).

Pictures not displaying image

Text files Empty

At on point one of my drives was even not accessable anymore in windows.

Later found out that restoring a Ghost Image fixed MBR, and made most of the files viewable and readable again.

The problems occured everytime i added new files to the disk (growing over 137GB, Wasn't aware of that at that time).

I had connected the my drives on Asus P4P800 Deluxe as follows:

Primary IDE on Motherboard:

CD-Rom

CD-RW

Secondary IDE on Motherboard:

DVD-Rom

DVD-RW

SATA1:

Western Digital 160GB (Never any Problems)

SATA2:

Western Digital 160GB (Never any Problems)

Promise Ultra 100TX2 IDE Controller Card

Primary IDE:

Maxtor 120GB (Never any Problems)

Western Digital 120GB (Never any Problems)

Secondary IDE:

Maxtor 250GB (Problems populating over 137GB)

Western Digital 200GB (Problems populating over 137GB)

Primary Via Raid Controller Onboard: (Not Setup as Raid)

Western Digital 120GB

Western Digital 250GB

Secondary Via Raid Controller Onboard:

None

Don't worry i have enough power!!

Turns out that i was using native XP drivers for the Promise card, wich looked okay, (Also sizes in windows explorer) but harddisk where not recognized as being 250GB or 200Gb thus corrupting data everytime when writing above 137GB.

At first i wasn't aware of this as windows XP Service pack1 and above support drives over 137GB.

You can verify this by doing a boot from windows CD, not pressing F6 and looking at the size of drives when windows asks where to install to. (You'll see the difference

I've solved the problem by forcing the latest drivers from manufacturer (F6, load from floppy), or integrating drivers into unattended install CD.

Don't end up losing precious data like i did and spending precious days trying to restore.

So my advise to all is:

1) Install manufacturer's drivers

2) Check for the correct detection of HardDisk Size (Not in windows Explorer)

I should probably start a lawsuite against microsoft for leaving this detail out and losing precious data, but just thought you had to know!