Subj : Win NT 4.0 and large hard drives
To   : Rich Ringer
From : William Grinolds
Date : Tue Sep 26 2000 01:51 pm

Rich Ringer wrote in a message to All:

 RR> Hi All,
 RR> I have a Win NT 4.0 workstation setp on my Novell network. The
 RR> problem I am  having is that according to the Book I need drivers
 RR> for any hard drive with  more than 1024 cylinders. I have a Samsung
 RR> hard drive that has 4924 cylinders,  16 heads & 63 sectors for a
 RR> total of 2.54 gig.
 RR> I would liek to utilize this on my workstation.....
 RR> Any ideas?
 RR> Any help would be appreciated

You'll need to tell your BIOS to employ LBA translation.  Just about all BIOSes 
made for Pentium-class and higher processors will do this.  Most 486's will, 
too, but not too many 386's and earlier allow it without an add-on card.

By my calculation, using LBA, that translates to about 615 cylinders, 128 
heads, and 63 sectors per track.  At least, that's what the BIOS would tell the 
operating system; only the BIOS would know the drive's true geometry.

In the case of Windows NT, the system/boot partitions (the system partition 
contains NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, etc., and the boot partition contains the \WINNT 
tree; both can be the same partition) must wholly reside below the 
1024-cylinder boundary.  If you didn't have LBA available, then your C: drive 
would have to be ~504 MB or less.  The rest can then be partitioned after WinNT 
installs and is able to start up on its own (using Disk Administrator).

Bill
Internet: wgrinolds@mail.com 
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