Large Hard Drive support/rebooting issue

Have a MS-6788 MSI Socket 478 mainboard (just built it last night for a friend). I installed a Seagate Serial ATA 200GB Hard Disk in there. On installing Windows XP, it picks up as about 131GB (the 137GB limit with Windows XP "unpatched"). My question is, once applying Service Pack 1, will all 200GB (or thereabouts) be seen in Windows environment? and are there any issues, as only 137GB supposedly was formatted.

Second question, when PC reboots at any stage wether Windows XP setup resets itself or you phsically reset the PC, the PC does not come back on, monitor light remains orange.

Running AMI bios version 1.5 (1.6 is available but haven't flashed it yet). thanks.

Third question, the HDD LED does not light up, it's something to do with the Serial ATA HDD. Connectors on board are correct.

HDD light, try swiching the plug around. It only goes one way :(

tried that, to no avail. Something to do with SATA I'm thinking?

You may need to enable 48 bit LBA before you can see all the drive, but once you've done that then you can use the extra unpartitioned space to make a new partition(s).

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;303013

ok, what about the power on problem after reset?

Have you got another ps you can try?

I'm going to flash to 1.6, then load setup defaults, then enable SATA support again, see if that fixes the reset problem. not a Power Supply issue here. Might play around with that HDD LED again, it should work on an IDE or SATA.

I have installed a Seagate SATA 200GB drive and it is still only picking up 127GB in Windows XP. I applied Service Pack 1, no change, I also followed Microsoft document "How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP". I then applied Q331958_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe found in Microsoft document 331958, I'm still getting 127GB. Does this mainboard support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing? Any other ideas?
I flashed to the latest bios (1.6) and BIOS reports hard disk as 200.1GB

When you say it's only picking up 127GB in Windows, where are you looking? Have a look in Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management and see if it's showing the extra space as unpartitioned space there.

yeh, after applying those patches I sorta figured I would have to add that unpartitioned space to my first partition so Windows would see the full size of the drive. One question, does PQMagic 5 work ok with NTFS partitions on Windows XP?

For XP you need to use PM 8 - you could have real problems if you use any earlier version.

yeh, I was a bit hesitant to try version 5

Actually to create and format a new partition you don't need any third-party software. You can do it from within Disk Management. Right-click on the unpartitioned space and you'll see a "Create partition" option, then just follow the wizard. Make it an extended partition and it'll keep the drive letters in order. Then once that's done right click in the newly created partition and choose Format.

what is the user wants all as one drive? i need to use Third Party software then.

Well each to their own I suppose. I wouldn't want 200GB as one partition that's for sure. There is Ranish, which is a freeware partition manager, but it isn't very easy to use:

Ranish Partition Manager

Ranish Tutorial

Guide to Multi-booting (includes Ranish instructions)

ahh, I'm just gonna use Disk Management

OR, I could image the current system to another Hard Disk, delete the original 137GB partition, reboot, then ghost the image back to the 200.1GB Hard Disk. that should work.

a 200 gig partition makes no sense. I can see several disadvantages to doing that. Certainly you could show them how to use Windows Explorer?

Viruses rarely jump over partitions. If you needed to reformat for any reason..... and you only had one partition all your data is at risk. Just my opinion.... never make one partition, it's a rookie mistake.

JAL, long time no see, I still remember you posting your first post here and me answering it...some time ago now!
Yes, I'm well aware of Hard-Disk management. Basically, what I'm going to do is, have the original 137GB partition for Windows, and the remainder as the second partition.
The only issue I can't work out on this is the no POST when doing a "restart computer" or a hard reset on the PC. The HDD LED apparently do not work with SATA hard-disks according to MSI.

So what do you actually have to do to get the PC restarted after a reboot/reset?

power down then power up.

I also have ANOTHER issue. this time with Norton Ghost 7.5 Corporate Edition not loading. I have a bootable floppy disk (tried 3 different floppy disks) with i set to start Ghost in the autoexec.bat, but it dosen't run, it just sits there. Maybe a later version of Ghost is in order?