3TB drive on Pentium 4, Windows XP SP2?
 

Hi -

I am in the middle of doing my first captures and have bought a 3TB SATA HDD which is installed on SATA 0 on my Intel D865PERL motherboard. I have downloaded the latest ATA controllers and Intel software but the BIOS only shows the drive as 801.6Gb and Windows Disk Management only shows the drive as 746.5Gb with no additional formatting options.

Please can you help me to expand to at least 2TB as I understand Windows XP supports 2TB ? I have done endless searches on Google which shows 746Gb issues but the fix for this issue depends on running Intel Rapid Storage Technology software, however, this software is not compatible with Windows XP Professional.

I am willing to try anything !
Thanks in advance for your advice

You can't reliably use anything over 2tb on XP -- and even some Vista and 7, depending on the exact hardware!
There are some tricks to make it "work", but not really.

Here a horror story: I was ripping my DVD collection to ISO, storing on HDD, using a Windows XP computer. When it hit 2tb, then disk lost the formatting. I returned the drive, thinking it was bad, and proceeded to go again. Yep, again, 2tb, it failed. I wasted a lot of time, and at least it was something that I could easily "recover" (redo).

Do you really want to take that risk?

It's about the hardware, it's not as a simple as using only 2tb worth. The hardware is fundamentally different, which is why 4tb can fit on those modern platters.

Just caught this. The reason why XP doesn't see 2+TB drives is that the OS doesn't support GUID Partition Table drives, only the older MBR style. XP x64 along with Vista/7 DO natively support and mount those drives. There is one 3rd party utility that claims to add support to XP, although I don't know how well it works. https://www.paragon-software.com/tec...ts/gpt-loader/