[The-D]

Last time I tried to downgrade from Vista to XP, the system could not find 470GB of my 600GB SATA disk. I have been looking for a way to solve this problem, but have not found any good information on other forums. How can I make XP "see" all 600GB of my harddrive? I have no idea where I'm going to find the correct drivers.

Like I wrote in my other thread, I've got an Hp Pavilion a6632 Phenom 8550 and my SATA disk is called WD 6400AAKS Caviar SE16. If there is any other information you'll need I'll try and look into it.

I tried to turn off "Native SATA Support" but then I could not find the disk nor the CD-player.

[GigaWatt]

i had the same problem when i tried to install XP on a custom build rig... i tried three different installations of XP SP2 (released in different time spans) and none of them read the 500GB Hitachi SATA drive. they all read different sizes of the drive but none of them read the correct ammount of disc space... even after i had partitioned and formated the HDD, the installations still read the HDD as none patitioned HDD, around 30GB...

i really have no idea why this happened... finaly i tried installing Server 2003, and the damn thing worked . it read the partitions and their sizes correctly...

a friend of mine also told me that XP SP3 had no problems reading the correct sizes of partitions or unpartitioned HDDs, either on prebuild rigs or custom build rigs...

really have no idea why this is happening... it would be great if someone can shed some light on the subject...

[Tipstaff]

Originally Posted by The-D

Last time I tried to downgrade from Vista to XP, the system could not find 470GB of my 600GB SATA disk. I have been looking for a way to solve this problem, but have not found any good information on other forums. How can I make XP "see" all 600GB of my harddrive? I have no idea where I'm going to find the correct drivers.

Like I wrote in my other thread, I've got an Hp Pavilion a6632 Phenom 8550 and my SATA disk is called WD 6400AAKS Caviar SE16. If there is any other information you'll need I'll try and look into it.

I tried to turn off "Native SATA Support" but then I could not find the disk nor the CD-player.

This isn't the first time I've heard this. I remember mention of this before where if you installed XP with SATA set to AHCI or RAID on the nForce 4 series chipset that sometimes the drive size can be miscalculated. I think it had to do with the original driver for the F6 portion of the install being too old. From what I remember people had this problem with the older 5 series SATA driver, and by switching to the newer 6 series they got things working. However, since Nvidia hasn't released new F6 install drivers for a long time you need to make your own.

2 questions: was the size correct before I got you to install the nForce drivers in the other thread? Also, when you say you turned off Native SATA, do you mean you switched it from compatible SATA where the bios treats the SATA controller as an IDE/PATA controller (if you didn't need the F6 driver during installation of XP then the bios was treating the SATA controller as an IDE/PATA controller, in which case you don't need the F6 driver to load the driver for the controller), or do you mean you switched it completely off? Did you do this in the bios, or within the controllers configuration window within Device Manager? I guess what I'm asking is what mode is the hard drives running in? Compatible (treated as IDE/PATA), AHCI, or RAID (even though you have a single drive you can still install it as a RAID supported system)?

[The-D]

Originally Posted by Tipstaff

This isn't the first time I've heard this. I remember mention of this before where if you installed XP with SATA set to AHCI or RAID on the nForce 4 series chipset that sometimes the drive size can be miscalculated. I think it had to do with the original driver for the F6 portion of the install being too old. From what I remember people had this problem with the older 5 series SATA driver, and by switching to the newer 6 series they got things working. However, since Nvidia hasn't released new F6 install drivers for a long time you need to make your own.

2 questions: was the size correct before I got you to install the nForce drivers in the other thread? Also, when you say you turned off Native SATA, do you mean you switched it from compatible SATA where the bios treats the SATA controller as an IDE/PATA controller (if you didn't need the F6 driver during installation of XP then the bios was treating the SATA controller as an IDE/PATA controller, in which case you don't need the F6 driver to load the driver for the controller), or do you mean you switched it completely off? Did you do this in the bios, or within the controllers configuration window within Device Manager? I guess what I'm asking is what mode is the hard drives running in? Compatible (treated as IDE/PATA), AHCI, or RAID (even though you have a single drive you can still install it as a RAID supported system)?

Sorry, I totally forgot about this post. I don't remember the details about the installation and the bios setting. However, I remember that a lot of windows updates sorted some issues that I had after having installed the drivers. I don't remember which drive that did not work 100%, it might have been the graphics. Anyway it all was sorted as soon as I started doing updates. I have not had any crashes or something malicious since I installed it. I don't remember what mode the hard drives are running in either, I think it was RAID.