Reinstalling Windows and very large hard drives

Factual Questions
1

So I decided to reformat my C: and reinstall Windows (XP) today, because hey, I didn’t have anything better to do. It all went smoothly, but even after I got Service Pack 1, my 160GB secondary hard drive (Windows itself is on an 80GB main drive) appeared as one 1GB partition in the front and 150-odd-GB of unpartitioned space.

Now, before this happened, it used to have a 1GB (FAT16) partition for a swap file, 130GB (NTFS) partition for storage, and the rest (roughly 18GB of NTFS) for storage of a completely different nature. I know Windows without SP1 can only see 137GB, but my motherboard (Nforce2 chipset) appears to see all 160GB, and it’s not like it wasn’t working before I reformatted.

I think what happened is that something screwed up the partition table, since all the data was there (and I’ve spent the past 5 hours rescuing it to various network shares so I can repartition). PartitionMagic would quit at the splash screen complaining about an invalid EZ-Drive setup, and I haven’t used EZ-Drive in years, so obviously it’s reading something it doesn’t like. Once I wipe every partition out, including the remaining 1GB one, it loads again.

When I first got this drive a few months ago, it did the same thing: I migrated my data, rebooted once, and suddenly bam I’ve got a 1GB partition and a bunch of empty space. PartitionMagic freaks out; I have to rescue and repartition. I didn’t reformat or anything then, even, so I can’t even figure out what thing I did caused it to go bad that time.

SO MY LONGWINDED QUESTION IS: should I unplug my 160GB drive if I ever reinstall Windows in the future, and plug it back in once I have SP1? What causes my partitions (except the very front one) to disappear? Do I have a physically bad drive?

ALSO: Should the BIOS be set to LBA or CHS? I thought it was LBA, but whenever I set it, the BIOS changes it to CHS after the reboot. Am I behind the times?

2

Very large HD’s require the manufactrurers, setup or formatting disk to prepare the disk for installation of the OS.

Try to locate the installation program for downloading and copy to a floppy or CD.

3

Most hard drives come with floppy or CD based partitioning utilities that will generally set up the drive properly for the OS you intend to use. If your drive did not come with this software you can usually get it from the drive manuf website off the net.

Use the utility. Delete all the partitions. Forget about making the 1 gig swapfle partition, as it does little, if anything, for real world performance under XP.

As a side note you may also want to see if your BIOS is the latest available and update it if possible. I’ve some experience with BIOSes that “saw”
the 160+ gig space and were happy when in XP , but couldn’t really handle them properly when formatting just off boot until they were re- flashed and updated.

4

OK, I prepared my drive with Seagate’s utility and put all my data back. I guess we’ll see what happens next time I install an OS. Thanks, you two!