NT4 Server and >137Gb IDE drives

Once again I come here for the best answers.

Is it possible to run an IDE drive bigger than 128 Gb on NT4 Server? It currently recognises a 180Gb drive as 128Gb only and works fine as expected. Apparently in 2000 SP3 and XP SP1 there is a registry entry to add to make big drives work but I am yet to see a definitive yes or no for NT4. Have tried Google and Microsoft KB with little success.

I decided to go for a large IDE just for some temp space since I could get 180Gb IDE for $600 compared with ~$1000 for a 73Gb SCSI.

Anyone else tried this?

TIA

What you need to do is upgrade your IDE controller to a >137GB model.

The Promise range seem to be amoung the best out there and it will co-exist with your existing (on-board) IDE controllers.

The Promise's controller has its own BIOS to give full access to all the drive capacity, even for boot support.

Try This Link for more details.

I don't know about local agents in OZ but I can buy the Promise controllers here for about $NZ70 or less for the "basic" model [so you should pay the same in $AUD once GST is factored in].

If you want me to source one for you and post it over I can do that.

NTFS has a 4 Terrabyte limitation. We'll not be approaching THAT for a while. Gotta be the hardware.

NTFS has a 4 Terrabyte limitation

NTFS does have a high limit, but most likely the IDE driver in NT 4 from 1995 dosen't know what LBA48 bit addressing is. Try finding a newer NT 4 IDE driver for your existing motherboard chipset, it may elliminate this issue. You will most likely have to load it by pressing F6 when the NT cd boots and first displays the blue screen. It's a hidden key sequence needed to tell NT not to do an autodetect, and instead let you load your own driver. For some reason it is needed quite a bit lately.

If that fails, then yes you will probably have to go down the hardware route to get a controller that can support the drive, and accompanying NT 4 driver.

Why did they put so many limitations into IDE? I look at the fact that a SCSI controller from more then a decade ago can be upgraded from an 80 meg to a 9 gig drive with no issues, but IDE has had storage stumbling blocks left and right.

Have you tried upgrading that PC's flash BIOS? Often, problems recognizing disk drives get solved with a flash BIOS upgrade.

Shouldn't really be a BIOS issue. The BIOS correctly detects it etc, it's just the OS drivers can't access past 128Gb since they only use the 28 bit LBA method. The drive is backward compatible for this reason.

Drakino is most likely right in saying that NT doesn't have LBA48 IDE drivers and that's really what I was asking - i.e. do they exist. The server is a DELL Poweredge 1400 with a Serverworks chipset. From the looks of things, the drivers don't exist so I guess I'll have to buy a new IDE card for it.

Thanks for the offer number6 but I'm sure I can get one over here...

Ugh.. probably need special add-on drivers for NT4.

But your RioCar/Empeg (with Hijack) will access the full capacity just fine.

-ml

Yeah but it looks like such drivers don't exist. Also it seems that things are running in PIO mode only with the drivers I do have since it really runs the P3 1GHz into the ground when using the drive.

Apparently also Dell don't support drives on the Serverworks IDE channels - only tape drives and CDROMs . They want SCSI only.

So I'm going to get a Promise ATA card which apparently has NT4 drivers and apparently supports LBA48

But your RioCar/Empeg (with Hijack) will access the full capacity just fine.

Of course thanks to you. And it's quite a simple change as I understand it from reading the ATA specs. Aaah the wonders of open source...

Dell don't support drives on the Serverworks IDE channels - only tape drives and CDROMs

Which Serverworks chipset? The ServerSet III HE/SL, at least (and I think the LE is the same), has a broken UDMA implementation, and can only safely do PIO or multi-word DMA. However I find MDMA is good enough to get my 24x CD writer whizzing happily, as it were...

Peter

It's an LE III chipset so that does sound like the problem and that's probably why Dell don't support hard drives on the IDE channels. But for CDROMs etc I guess it works OK.

I'm getting an Promise ATA card so things should be OK...