HELP! newly formatted 300GB HD seen as only 131GB

[Moodie]

Help! I have a problem similar to MasterMind8687's July 18, 2005 problem.

I just bought a new Samsung HD300LD hard drive for achiving my data. I plan on making it portable by putting it in a BAFO BF-2003 USB2 external drive enclosure (which says on the box that it's compatible with HDs up to 300GB). I'm using a no-brand P4 system running Windows XP Home with SP1 & SP2 installed with 2 other NTFS HDs already in use based on a USB2 & SATA capable ASUS P4S800 motherboard. The BIOS is Award BIOS version 1009 installed in 2004.

I installed the new HD internally and formatted it using Windows' Administrative Tools, partitioning it as 3 approximately equal Basic NTFS drives. I then spent hours adding files to it. So far, so good. But when I moved the drive to the external case and plugged it in the system only saw one 131GB drive that it described as in RAW format and asked me if I wanted to format it. Needless to say I didn't. So I plugged it back in as an internal drive and once again the system treated it properly as 3 half-filled partitions totaling about 300GB. I then spent more hours copying my data back off the new drive to my other internal drives, ending with an empty HD that I intended to reformat in the external case. (I think I heard somewhere that external drives needed to be formatted that way.) Then I moved it into the case to be formatted only to find that the system still saw it as only one partition of 131GB. I've had no problems at all (either internally or externally mounted) with the other HD that was previously in the BAFO case, but it was only 80GB, not 300GB. What am I doing wrong?

Edited June 12, 2006 by Moodie

[LLXX]

The controller of the external case does not support 48-bit LBA.

[allen2]

A lot of external enclosure seems to have this problem. I also had the same problem and i simply gave up on making this enclosure works with hard drives >120Gb.