> John Ferrell wrote:
> >
> > I ordered & received a Seagate 200GB drive from TigerDirect for
> > $149+$11.32+tax-$50 rebate. It was packed in two plastic shells
> suspended in
> > a pair of foam shock absorbers. Installation was well documented but
> > required a large down load from the Seagate site. It had to
> make a registry
> > change in XP Pro to get by the 137 GB boundry.
>
> What 137GB boundary? I'm looking at buying a 160GB drive RSN.
> Are we STILL running into stupid software/BIOSes? 512MB, 8GB and
> now 137GB?
> R

        IIRC the 137GB boundary is a result of LBA, which of course was a patch to
get more then around 500MB of storage on a hard drive.

        It's easy math: LBA is 28 bits, biggest unsigned number that 28 bits can
represent is:

2^28 = 268 435 456 sectors
Each sector on an IDE disk (with very few exceptions) is 512 Bytes,
therefore:
268435456 x 512 = 137 438 953 472 bytes = 128GB (or 137GB in the hard drive
version of GB)

There is an extension to LBA called LBA32 which uses 32 bits of data to
represent the sector. I believe to you use it you need OS and BIOS support,
although you might no longer need BIOS support (unless your boot partition
exists above the 137GB boundary, in which case your bios won't see the boot
partition and your system won't boot!).

As for your comment: "Are we STILL running into stupid software/BIOSes?" the
answer is: of course we are. And we always will. The amount of storage must
always be addressed. The addresses must always have a finite number. Until
some scheme is used where the amount of bits used to represent storage is
encoded (and variable) we will always hit limits like this. This is a fact
of life.

TTYL


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