Ok, I’ve gathered this from scattered sources: the addressing scheme used by BIOSes to reference points on a hard drive until very recently only supported drives up to 137 GB, because that’s the maximum size/reference their address data could hold.
Apparently, recent bios flashes and windows upgrades improve this by instituting a new addressing structure.
Here’s my situation: I have a hardware RAID setup and 2 80 gig drives. I’m going to be making a raid 0 array, which means a 160 gig array.
So, here’s my question: Does this 137 gig barrier affect me? I’m guessing perhaps not, because each drive only has 80 gigs of address space to work with, well within the limit. However, I’m not sure at what ‘level’ the check is done.
If the RAID/IDE controller reports the setup to the bios as a 160 gig setup, then it would seem that I would be affected. If, however, the bios recognizes each drive seperately, I wouldn’t.
In any case, windows might have a problem with this, since the RAID is done in hardware, as far as windows knows, I have a 160 gig drive.
So, first, does anyone know if this affects me? Second, the only way to fix windows for that, if it does affect me, is through patches and service packs.
Second, can I install windows on the setup (and have it only recognize 137 gig), and then patch it, and have it just correct itself and see all 160?