I have WinXP and suse 9.0 on my PC. Recently I have added a nother 200GB drive. WinXP could recognise only 138GB which I allocated for NTFS. Then I re-installed SUSE(which recognises 186GB) and added the rest(48GB) was allocated to /dev/home directory. But after the installation my XP partition was completely disappeared. So I would like to know whether there is any solution without installing a new system. If not can anyone tell me a distro which could recognise bigger hard drives?

Thank you in advance,
NoviceW

I think they all can. I am not aware of any distros that cannot read beyond 200 GB. I could be mistaken though.

And you need Service Pack 1 for Windows XP to recognize anything above 138GB. This is due to a problem Windows had with 48 bit LBA addressing. There used to be a separate update for this, but it has now just been added to SP1.

You could also just edit the registry to enable the larger LBA, but you might feel safer just getting the update .

You are sure that your motherboard supports drives that large though, right? If we are talking about an old motherboard, it may not have support for 48 bit LBA.

Hi MS3FGX,

I have ASUS A7V AGP Pro/4X Motherboard. But I do not know whether it supports 48 bit LBA. Anyway I will try to update XP and see whether it works.

NoviceW