Hi,

I've been stung TWICE with a destroyed 180 GB disk (single partition created using Partition Magic) on Windows XP, before installing any Service Packs. I was worried that the disk was bad since this problem occured immediately after attaching it to another Windows XP computer. After
combing the Microsoft site for hard disk corruption notes, I found these articles. I suppose I'm having these problems because I'm using an older WindowsXP and installing the service packs manually.

Hard Disk May Become Corrupted When Entering Standby or Hibernation or When Writing a Memory Dump
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;331958

How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

If you get this atapi driver update, you can then use the WindowsXP disk management tools to create partitions larger than 137 GB for those new 250 GB disks. Sweet !

Q331958_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b997cc5f-4483-4edc-a17e-6f659a033b0d&DisplayLang=en

I'm not a big fan of standby or hibernation in any way. And I
always disconnect my external harddisk before going into such
a mode or shutting down a system.

Intriguing though! I didn't know the maximum was 137 GB (weird
number!). Keep in mind that they claim support is ALREADY in
SP1 for this. I do know SP1 formatted harddisk cannot be read
(sometimes?) under a non SP1 XP installation.

Rob, you're right about the SP1 support. However, I had been using my large hard drive with some non-SP1 WinXP and Win2k computers for quite some time. Partition Magic allows the creation of the larger partitions, but I didn't realize that SP1 or the hotfix was needed to prevent the destruction of these disks.

Also, my dual ATA133 controller card call explicitly supports larger drives on my non-SP1 WinXP. The card came with my 250 GB WD disk drive.

The 137 GB seems to be roughly 2**37 = 137,438,953,472 .
Normally, that would be 128 GB, but as we all know, the disk drive
manufacturers decided to G = 1 billion rather than 2**32 as other computer parts are termed. Disks platters aren't built on a Base2 numerical system, but the controllers are. Go figure.