Source for 48-bit LBA Information









Bios Upgrades

  
 

48-bit LBA and Windows 2000

Windows 2000 supports 48-bit LBA with Service Pack 3. You must also have a 48-bit LBA compatible BIOS and add or change a value in the Windows registry. The following are the major issues involving 48-bit LBA and Windows 2000:

Service Pack 3. To use a 48-bit LBA hard drive with Windows 2000 you must upgrade to Service Pack 3 or greater. If Windows 2000 is already installed you can use Windows Update to install SP3. If you are doing a new install of Windows 2000 make sure the installation CD is labeled "Including Service Pack 3" and note that Windows 2000 SP3 install has a problem where it does not support creating partitions greater than 137 GB. Refer to paragraph below Windows 2000 install does not support creating partitions greater than 137 GB.

EnableBigLba registry value. To enable 48-bit LBA support with Windows 2000 you must add or change the EnableBigLba registry value to 1 in the Windows registry. Simply upgrading and installing Service Pack 3 does not enable this registry value by default. For instructions on how to add EnableBigLba to the Windows registry, click here.

BIOS support for 48-bit LBA. As stated in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 305098 one of the requirements to use 48-bit LBA support in Windows 2000 is that you must have a 48-bit LBA compatible BIOS. To test your system's BIOS for 48-bit LBA, refer to our HDInfo tool. If your 48-bit LBA hard drive is connected to a PCI ATA controller card, you should make sure the card supports 48-bit LBA. If the card was provided with the hard drive this should be the case.

Windows 2000 install does not support creating partitions greater than 137 GB. When doing a new install of Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 from the installation CD, the setup program will only allow you to create a single partition up to 131 GB even though 48-bit LBA is supported with Service Pack 3. This is a problem if would like to use your 48-bit LBA hard drive at full capacity with a single partition. You can solve this problem by using a 3rd party partition utility after Windows 2000 is installed to resize to full capacity the 131 GB partition originally created during the install. PowerQuest Partition Magic and Acronis Partition Expert support partition resizing. Unfortunately, you cannot use any of the partition utilities provided by the hard drive manufacturers as none of the applications we tested support partition resizing.


 
 

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