Specifications
Windows 137GB Capacity Barrier Version 1.0
15 7-Mar-2003
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.
As a matter of system maintenance, Microsoft recommends that you keep your system updated
with the latest Windows 2000 Service Pack. See Microsoft Knowledgebase article Q260910:"How
to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack" at support.microsoft.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.
New system consideration
–Seagate's DiscWizard Starter Edition disc installation software is
designed to make building a new system as easy as possible. This software supports several
controller card models. DWSE also provides the convenience of a fast partition and format saving
nearly an hour over the operating system tools.
When building a new system, if you are using a ATA/133 PCI controller card which includes new
ATA or ATAPI disk device drivers, the Windows 2000 operating system installation will pause
briefly and ask for you to insert a OEM floppy diskette. This pause for new "adapter" drivers
happens soon after the boot near the beginning of the installation. See your controller
documentation for specifics.
If your Windows 2000 CD does not indicate SP3, then your boot drive partition will have a
maximum size of 137GB. After the OS and SP3 are installed, any additional gigabytes will show
up as unallocated space on the drive and you can easily create a second partition with
DiscWizard 2003 or the Windows disk management tools. Also, if you prefer to have a single
partition, third party applications such as Partition Commander from VCom or Partition Magic
from Powerquest may be able to stretch the partition to annex the newly found capacity.
Microsoft does provide a method of merging the Service Pack into an older copy of Windows
2000. This process is called "Slipstreaming" and is very complicated. This process requires that
you be able to burn a new Windows 2000 OS installation CD. You can search the Internet for
"slipstreaming Windows 2000" to find instructions on this process. Seagate does not assist in
preparing slipstream installation CDs.
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.