Hard drive needs certain OS?

RebelX

New Member
Hello, i am new to this forums and i have a question.

I am planning on buying a new 750GB hard drive to replace my old 145GB one. The hard drive that i am looking at is this one:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3405853&body=MAIN

When you scroll down to the "What you should know" category it says this:

"In order to properly access the full capacity of an ATA interface hard drive or partition larger than 137GB and properly support 48-bit logical block addressing, Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 are required. This issue does not affect SCSI hard drives."

I only understand about 35% of what that says. Does this mean that I have to have those operating systems listed in order to use the entire hard drive?

Thanks for the help!
 
Thank you for the suggestion. I now plan on buying the Samsung.

What are "multiple partitions"? I'm sorry, but i am a slight n00b to this kind of stuff. I plan on upgrading to Windows XP Professional SP2 after i have transfered all the data from my old hard drive. So, if i have XP Pro SP2 will i still have to make "multiple partitions" or anything like that?

Thanks in advance.
 
You should install sp2 no matter what, so it shouldn't be a problem. You just won't be able to partition the entire drive during the installation unless you have a cd with sp1 or sp2 on it.

Without any service pack, not even multiple partitions will help.
 
A partition is like dividing the HD into many different sections or HDS. When you see it in the MY COMPUTEr it will look like many different HD's.
 
A partition is like dividing the HD into many different sections or HDS. When you see it in the MY COMPUTEr it will look like many different HD's.

Ohhhhh, thanks for explaining. So which is better, partitioning a hard drive or not?

And one more question, will upgrading from XP Media Center Edition to XP Pro erase all the data on my hard drive?
 
if you have sp2 it will see the entire drive space. with sp2 multiple partition is optional.
XP SP1 and SP2 can partition the entire drive. For pre SP1, even with multiple positions you can't use the entire drive. The OS can only address so much of a drive.
So which is better, partitioning a hard drive or not?
You have to partition it to use it. Some people like multiple partitions because you can seperate your data from the OS and if you have to format your OS partition you still have your data.
 
And one more question, will upgrading from XP Media Center Edition to XP Pro erase all the data on my hard drive?

Unless you get an upgrade, yes.

Although, I don't see why you don't want to keep Media Center. It is essentially an upgraded version on XP Pro (isn't it?:confused: )
 
Although, I don't see why you don't want to keep Media Center. It is essentially an upgraded version on XP Pro
It's an XP Home derivative not pro :)

You might be able to install it over the current version of XP, as long as you don't format most of the data will stay.
 
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