Re: XP on a 120gig sata

From: modelingfrog (modelingfrog_at_notspamedever.com)
Date: 07/05/04 

Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 18:04:11 -0400

My mobo is an 661FX-M which does have many features in the bios,(more then
the asus i had) and I have enabled a few features related to sata from
within the bios/cmos but durring the instalation of XP I could not press F6
(nothing happened) to add 3rd party raid drivers, but later was promted for
them because windows could not recognize a large drive being present. I did
install the drivers and continued but installed the OS on 80gig and used the
40 on the side. obviously now i understand that XP does not need 80gigs to
work, and after some listeneing and some mild research i now believe that
the two partitions are necessary but will need to get the OS on a smaller
partition say 15gig and change all of the defaults to point to the second
partion, taking into account the risks of conflicts (users folders and
settings and all being on the second partition)
so far I have found several MS KB documents regarding changing the default
locations and other such related articles and will study them for the next
time I do windows.
I thank you all for you wonderful insights and advice,

"Alex Nichol" <alexn.mvpdts@ntlworld.delete.com> wrote in message
news:hvaje0ljijdtvktt52ajlikr3pkgs58r7b@4ax.com...
> modelingfrog wrote:
>
> >I understand that windows has its limitations with large drives, reason
why
> >I needed the Raid drivers.
> >
> >when purchased, the dealer mentioned that I should partition my Maxtor
> >120gig sata into 80 and 40 gig partitions.
> >
> >My question,
> >is this actually required for XP to work properly and run optimally?
>
> No. And he is misleading you. It is not necessary to use RAID for
> drives up to any available size. There may be 'breakpoints' in what
> your BIOS will handle, notable ones being at 32 and 80 GB and most
> importantly at 128 GB (137 decimal billion for nominal drive size). All
> these relate to the *total* size of the disk, and partitioning it will
> not help if the BIOS cannot handle the matter. And to go beyond the 128
> (thus needing '48 bit LBA') needs XP with SP1. That might also need a
> plug in auxiliary card to provide the hardware/BIOS support, but that
> does not mean using RAID even if the card is capable of providing that
>
> That said I would *not* install XP on a large disk in a single
> partition. Keep one modest size one (maybe up to 20 GB at most) for
> system and programs, and the rest for data. That makes it practicable
> to use sensible backup strategies and methods - the two need different
> approaches
>
> --
> Alex Nichol MS MVP (Windows Technologies)
> Bournemouth, U.K. Alexn@mvps.D8E8L.org (remove the D8 bit)

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