Specifications

Windows 137GB Capacity Barrier Version 1.0
13 7-Mar-2003
4. Windows Millennium (Me) on a PCI controller card
Controller cards support ATA interface disc drives through their own onboard BIOS and Windows
device drivers. These storage controller cards are plug-and-play compatible and usually detected
in the Windows Device Manager as "SCSI controllers" due to the similarity in disc access
command structure. Since the drives are supported by drivers that emulate the SCSI driver
approach, the native Windows 137GB ATA limitation does not apply since those drivers are not in
use.
Companies which are known to manufacture ATA controller cards that support drives greater
than 137GB are SIIG, Inc (http://www.siig.com
), Promise Technology, Inc.
(http://www.promise.com
), HighPoint Technologies, Inc. (http://www.highpoint-tech.com) and
ACARD Technology (http://www.acard.com
).
If your disc drives are recognized by the controller BIOS when the system is first powered on but
later the drives are not seen by Windows then the device drivers for the controller card need to be
installed. See your controller card documentation for direction.
Windows Me has a feature call System Restore that records and tracks changes to the system
settings and files. If a restore point exists you can undo harmful changes to the previous settings.
It is highly recommended that you create new system restore points prior to making significant
changes to your system.
New system consideration
– Seagate's DiscWizard Starter Edition disc installation software is
designed to make building a new system as easy as possible. DWSE also provides the
convenience of a fast partition and format saving nearly an hour over the operating system tools.
This software supports several controller card models.
As noted above, controller cards utilize custom 48-bit device drivers that support the full capacity
of the drive. Unfortunately, in Windows Me, these drivers are added after the operating system is
installed. This means that the initial partition may be smaller than the full capacity of the drive.
Once the controller card drivers are installed, any additional gigabytes will show up later as
unallocated space on the drive. You can easily create a second partition with DiscWizard 2003 or
the Windows Fdisk partitioning tools.
Adding a drive to an existing system
– The installation procedure is relatively easy if your original
boot drive is attached to the motherboard and your new drive is attached to the controller card as
additional storage. If you want your new drive to become the boot drive, your system BIOS must
have an option to control the boot device or to release boot control from the Primary Master to the
controller card. This is sometimes listed as "boot from SCSI".
Seagate's DiscWizard 2003 disc installation software for Windows is designed to make adding a
new drive to a system as easy as possible.
5. Windows 2000 on a traditional motherboard
At the time of this writing (January 2003), new copies of Windows 2000 Full Versions have
incorporated full 48-bit Addressing for ATA interface disc drives. You can confirm that your copy