Hello to one and all.

I have a question, I have a 160 GB Western Digital drive as my primary drive and I would like to format it to the full capacity under Windows XP. I don't like using the disk that came with the drive to format it because it installs Ezdrive and makes it impossible to make an image of the drive using PQ Drive Image. Any ideas or tools that come to mind that could format the drive to the full capacity so I could install Windows XP with out Ezdrive? Any assistance would be appreciated.

um.. when the xpcd does this, i have no clue what ezdrive is. when you boot from your xpcd and the setup has you select the hdd, just reformat the entier hdd. thats unless you have an oem xpcd from some crappy manufacturer...

AFAIK, ezcd is a crappy disk manager originally designed for older systems (that don't support large hard disks) to correctly address the disk. If you have a "decent" system you won't be needing it, just use your XPCD to partition/format your drive, I recommend using NTFS file system.

NTF file system

Unless your bios supports 48 bit lba access you are asking for trouble. There is a work around for this though.

Attach your hard disk to a machine that supports full capacity of your disk. Only create partitions in this , primary & extended, set one of them as active.

Now you can move this disk to your pc & install windows. Although the bios will not see the full capacity windows will allow access to the full capacity.

You don't need to use the manufacturer's util if:

1. BIOS supports large disk. My over four year old BIOS supports it so it's very unlikely any new BIOS doesn't. If your BIOS doesn't and can't be upgraded then it's no good.

2. Windows XP has SP1 at least.

You can only format >32GB partitions using NTFS in WinXP.

Provided the above conditions are true, you can partition and format the HD during XP installation.

Ok, to get the whole picture here, give use the exact computer specs, software versions, etc, and also the approx year your pc was purchaced. This way we can assist you better.

XP SP0 can use 48bit LBA but u have to manually enable it.

Yep,

check my post here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=79444

jaclaz

thank to all who responded i have several options to try. will let u guys know which one works....

Edited July 30, 200620 yr by darcmatter