22JAN07 – Just as humans eyes can’t register infrared light which is all around us, nearly every operating system to do with Windows can’t register hard drives beyond 127GB even though you know there are 200, 250, 300 or more GB for it to see and write to.

The part of the computer responsible for seeing how much space is in your hard drive is BIOS, not always Windows. Since most BIOS systems cannot natively view beyond 127GB (some say 128 and others 137GB), we’ll begin by understanding that we need to assist BIOS by either updating it or going around it.

Your FIRST option is to determine your BIOS maker’s site and grab any updates pertaining to ‘drive overlay software.’ One such update is EZ Bios, but the file name varies. The cost of overlaying BIOS controllers with overlay software is performance. The drivers for IDE hard drives won’t be accessing the drive directly, they’ll be going through the interpreter’s overlay.

Your SECOND option is to do something similar but from the maker of the hard drive. Maxtor makes the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler software patch. It doesn’t act as a delay between the drivers and the drive. The patch enters the Windows and enables large drive support which is something you may remember being able to do during an installation of Windows 98. The cost of such patches is that they primarily affect only Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or higher or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or newer.

Your THIRD option is to update not BIOS, nor Windows, but your chipset IF you have one of the following chipsets from Intel:

810, 810E, 810E2, 810L, 815, 815EP, 815G, 815EG, 815P, 820, 820E, 840, 845, 845E, 845G, 845GE, 845GL, 845GV, 845PE, 850, 850E, 860
The little download is called, the “Intel Application Accelerator.” You can make good use of a personal benchmarking program to identify your chipset on the motherboard. Obviously this “IAA” won’t work if you don’t have an Intel chipset.

Your FOURTH option is to attach the unread hard drive to an installed Ultra ATA PCI adapter or expansion card. Be sure it has a 48-bit LBA compliant BIOS and controller driver. Also be sure to ALWAYS add hardware when the computer is turned OFF. What the PCI card does is forsake the system BIOS that an earlier option updated, and forsake the Windows controller driver which another option updated and instead, uses its own BIOS and controller drivers to handle the task. This option should be considered if none of the others have been tried. The drawback of this option is the cost of the PCI hardware. One such example of the adapters in this example is the Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI for Windows.