Data Recovery Weekly

If Windows XP doesn't see more than 137 (or 128) GB of disk space on the large disk, then you need to turn on BigLBA . To enable BigLBA on an XP computer, it is needed to change the parameter in the registry. Such an approach works well when the XP has been already installed, but if you need to make a fresh installation on the large disk, you can't change the parameter because the registry does not yet exist. To work around this issue, you can do one of the following: Include the latest Service Park into the installation CD (this process is called "slipstreaming"), and then the full disk capacity will be available during install. Install the XP on a partition with the size, say, 100 GB, then install the latest Service Pack, enable BigLBA , and use a tool like Partition Magic to extend the partition onto the remaining space. Normally, we'd recommend that you backup before resizing a partition, but since this is a new install anyway, there is nothing useful to backu...

If the drive has become the RAW file system , you should first check the drive size to see if it is exactly 128 or 137 GB. The raw filesystem issue may be caused by the clipped hard drive capacity. If you see 137 or 128 GB, you need to check whether the BigLBA still works before you rush to recover data. This is especially true for the drives (including external USB drives) which were brought to an old computer. The BigLBA is a registry parameter which determines whether to use 48bit block addressing or not. If it is disabled then the maximum accessible disk size equals to 128 or 137 GB (depending on what units are used for the drive size, binary or decimal gigabytes). Sometimes it turns out that the BigLBA is off despite the fact that theoretically it should be enabled in any modern installation (starting with Windows XP SP2). Refer to the instructions for troubleshooting disk capacity issues for more details on what you need to check and how to enable the BigLBA parameter. If in fac...