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Electronics Repair (sci.electronics.repair) Discussion of repairing electronic equipment. Topics include requests for assistance, where to obtain servicing information and parts, techniques for diagnosis and repair, and annecdotes about success, failures and problems. |
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#1
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
What's the best I can do?
All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... Thanks for any help. |
#2
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
What's the best I can do?
All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... I suspect that what you're running into is the 2.2-terabyte limit in the standard PC Master Boot Record. This would correspond to 32 bits worth of sectors (4 hexabillion) at 512 bytes each. Probably, when your partition table is being built, the software you're using is trying to read the hard drive size via the PC BIOS, and the sector count is wrapping around past 4 billion. The program ends up with (3 terabytes - 2.2 terabytes) worth of sectors, and so you only get 750 GB. I'm not an expert in the PC BIOS, but I suspect that the "read drive sector count" call returns a 32-bit result, and the BIOS isn't smart enough to clip (rather than wrap) at 2.2 terabytes. If that's the case, no matter what program you use, you'll hit the same behavior. There's probably a fix, although it won't be trivial. What you would need to do is let the software partition the drive. If you want more than one partition, delete the single 750-gig existing one and create the smaller ones you want at first, and then create a final partition which uses up the remainder of the 750 GB space. Then go in with a sector-level disk editing program, and edit the partition table by hand. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record You'd want to edit the "number of sectors in partition" value at offset 12 (0x0C) for the last (or only) partition and set it to "0xFFFFFFFF" (or slightly less than that) and store this entry. This would expand that partition to 2.2 terabytes. Save the MBR, reboot, and I think you'd find that you have more space available. HOWEVER: depending on how your PC accesses the drive, you could find that Bad Things happen when it tries to write beyond the 2.2-terabyte boundary - reads and writes might wrap around to the beginning of the disk. For that reason, it would probably be safest to limit the total size of the partitions you create to slightly less than 2.2 terabytes, so that all of the subsequent I/O operations are compatible with a 32-bit sector-offset API. |
#3
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
"Dave Platt" wrote in message ... What's the best I can do? All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... I suspect that what you're running into is the 2.2-terabyte limit in the standard PC Master Boot Record. This would correspond to 32 bits worth of sectors (4 hexabillion) at 512 bytes each. Probably, when your partition table is being built, the software you're using is trying to read the hard drive size via the PC BIOS, and the sector count is wrapping around past 4 billion. The program ends up with (3 terabytes - 2.2 terabytes) worth of sectors, and so you only get 750 GB. I'm not an expert in the PC BIOS, but I suspect that the "read drive sector count" call returns a 32-bit result, and the BIOS isn't smart enough to clip (rather than wrap) at 2.2 terabytes. If that's the case, no matter what program you use, you'll hit the same behavior. There's probably a fix, although it won't be trivial. What you would need to do is let the software partition the drive. If you want more than one partition, delete the single 750-gig existing one and create the smaller ones you want at first, and then create a final partition which uses up the remainder of the 750 GB space. Then go in with a sector-level disk editing program, and edit the partition table by hand. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record You'd want to edit the "number of sectors in partition" value at offset 12 (0x0C) for the last (or only) partition and set it to "0xFFFFFFFF" (or slightly less than that) and store this entry. This would expand that partition to 2.2 terabytes. Save the MBR, reboot, and I think you'd find that you have more space available. HOWEVER: depending on how your PC accesses the drive, you could find that Bad Things happen when it tries to write beyond the 2.2-terabyte boundary - reads and writes might wrap around to the beginning of the disk. For that reason, it would probably be safest to limit the total size of the partitions you create to slightly less than 2.2 terabytes, so that all of the subsequent I/O operations are compatible with a 32-bit sector-offset API. Pretty sure something nasty would happen if I tried for more than 2.2Gb partition - but I can't even get that. I was thinking more along the lines of 2x 1.5Tb partitions. |
#4
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
In article ,
Ian Field wrote: Pretty sure something nasty would happen if I tried for more than 2.2Gb partition - but I can't even get that. I was thinking more along the lines of 2x 1.5Tb partitions. That _may_ be workable, but you're probably going to have to do more math, and become more familiar with the PC Master Boot Record and how to hack it. Setting up the MBR to work in LBA (logical block address) mode, rather than C/H/S, would probably make things easier. Again, it's going to depend a lot on your PC and its device drivers. If it's capable of accessing the drive in LBA48 mode (with a 48-bit logical block address) you may get away with it. If not, you may be stuck with 2.2 terabytes at most. |
#6
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 11:10:02 AM UTC-7, Ian Field wrote:
What's the best I can do? All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... Thanks for any help. If you can live with it as non bootable data only, put it in a USB3 enclosure and use it that way. XP is fine with 3tb USB drives. G² |
#7
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
wrote in message ... On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 11:10:02 AM UTC-7, Ian Field wrote: What's the best I can do? All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... Thanks for any help. If you can live with it as non bootable data only, put it in a USB3 enclosure and use it that way. XP is fine with 3tb USB drives. Someone gave me one of those they'd dropped on the USB connector - figuring out where all the ripped up tracks went became a "back burner" project. |
#8
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
"Mike Tomlinson" wrote in message news En el artículo , Ian Field gangprobi escribió: What's the best I can do? All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... Thanks for any help. This is the wrong group for a start. Which would you reccomend? |
#9
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
On 08/26/2017 02:21 PM, Ian Field wrote:
wrote in message ... On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 11:10:02 AM UTC-7, Ian Field wrote: What's the best I can do? All the partition managers tried so far, offer a single partition just under 750Gb and no remaining unpartitioned space. A 2Tb drive works just fine - I'd even settle for that from the 3Tb one.......... Thanks for any help. If you can live with it as non bootable data only, put it in a USB3 enclosure and use it that way. XP is fine with 3tb USB drives. Someone gave me one of those they'd dropped on the USB connector - figuring out where all the ripped up tracks went became a "back burner" project. I just got a couple of the Plugable ones (2.5/3.5 inch) and they work great--it really cut down my backup/restore times. I built myself a new Qubes box (Thinkpad T430, 16G, 1T SSD) which required restoring all my VMs from backup. (I could have used dd and then resized the partition and file system, but that's a pain on an encrypted partition.) Cheers Phil Hobbs -- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net |
#10
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3Tb HDD on an XP32 box?
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