[Analog Kid]

I currently have an 80-gig external that I use STRICTLY for back-ups. I wanted to get a second external HD (either 500 gigs or 1TB) to back up that one-but now, I'm seeing that the requirements are at least a minimum of XP.

The thing is that I have some older PCs, and in case I want to upload stuff to the newer HD, what kind of problems am I looking at, using W2k? How do I get around them?

[Raina]

If the limitation is the software recognizing larger drives, would partitioning the drive (using another computer) work?

[Nick]

There is very little actual difference between Win2k and WinXP, especially with hardware compatibility. The default USB mass storage device drivers should work fine. There is a (fixable) 137 gigabyte limit in Win2k, but I don't know if it's applicable to USB drives.

Before using the new drive for any backups, test it on each of the computers you will be using and ensure they can all see the full drive size. You may need to change some registry keys, which is detailed here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098

The "requires Windows XP" may be due to this limitation, or that the drive manufacturer simply doesn't want to deal with tech support requests from people running anything older.

[Orpheus]

I've run 200-500GB HDDS under Win2K on *many* systems, without any problems at all, despite the "137 GB limit"

Unfortunately, I can't spell out the exact conditions under which I did it. I was running working systems, not conducting experiments on OS performance, so I don't know if I even kept notes when things "just worked".

I can tell the three things I had done at various times, but I'm not sure, offhand, which combos I used.

1) I've always enabled 48-bit LBA support (http://support.micro...om/?kbid=305098) as part of my system set-up since (at least) Win2K SP2. IIRC I used the then-current version of this program. I still have the program I *actually* used, but I didn't record the details of version number and source. It was a free download from the original source, so if you want it, I'd be happy to email it to you.

2) While I believe that was enough for my Celeron 400 MHz+ systems, I don't have any systems of that vintage currently running Windows and a big drive, because I had a glitchy set of hot-swap carrier/bays [Don't even think about hot-swapping HDDs in Win2k, not matter WHAT the manufacturer claims/claimed. It'll only takes one random glitch to make you regret it: you can damage the drive (permanently, but not to the point of unusability) or the motherboard HDD controller (often to the point of unusability)] Early on, I blew a onboard HDD controller, but revived (and upgraded) the "killed" system by plugging a Promise ATA-66 PCI controller (later upgraded by card BIOS patch to ATA-100) I was so happy with the repair (and upgrade) that I got a 10-card lot of them on eBay, and installed them on all my older systems. It occurs to me now that this may be part of the reason why my systems of that vintage ran with acceptable desktop performance until quite recently (I only completely quit running Win2K as a desktop in 2008 or early 2009, and frankly, since those systems are not really Vista-capable, I'll probably revert most of them to Win2K when WinXP hits End-of-Life in the coming year. Win2K really was a highwater of performance per hardware in the Windows world. Sure 2K isn't capable of *a fairly few* functions that XP can do, but third-party Win2K software could do most of that.) I don't know what those cards run on eBay today, but they ran ~$15/card back in the day, and each card could operate at least 4 ATA drives -- and would speed up pre-ATA EIDE drives nicely. Promise Ultra ATA-133/150/166 controllers may be easier to find today, and work just as well. They have their own on-board BIOS that makes them *truly* plug and play with no driver worries. You can even boot off them, just like the original mobo controller.

3) I always partitioned my larger drives into 3-5 Logical drives, but mostly because I often swap drives between systems and a consistent partition structure was easier than keeping track of which physical hard drives were installed in which system at any given time. In fact, I still use most of those drives as removable archival or backup storage and/or "rescue booting" [years after they failed S.M.A.R.T testing, and can't be trusted for daily use] and I still find my "standard partitioning" scheme very useful. I'm not sure if that's due to any intrinsic merit, or just because I, personally, have been using this same partitioning schema since the last century

I believe any one of the above tricks will suffice, but you might need two (e.g. EnableLBA + Promise) in some cases.

Heck, try all three: the Promise ATA card is cheap (and improves speed over EIDE) and the other two tricks are free

[Nick]

From other postings I gathered around the Internets, it seems those utilities just change the necessary registry keys to enable LBA.

One note however, I don't think a Promise card will do you much good since this will be a USB drive--the Promise card will never see or touch the USB hard drive, so it would probably be fairly pointless.

[Orpheus]

Sorry. I missed the word "external" in the OP

You're right about EnableLBA, but even though I meddle in the Registry with the carefree abandon of Flipper warning a tuna trawler about offshore pirates, it's still easier to run a small app. It's 'safer', so it's what I recommend to friends.

As far as using USB drives for backups (which I also do), I should warn you that not all older drives are equally reliable on USB adapters. I'm talking about individual drives, not make/model. As I mentioned above, I often use retired drives (esp. those that fail S.M.A.R.T, which turns out to be a rather over-conservative "better safe than sorry" assessment) for backups, and I had several incidents where the drive partitions could not be read at all over USB. It was no reall loss, because I rotate backuos over several drives, but it was annoying, because the drives would work another couple of years after a reformat. I eventually learned that the formatting/partitioning/data was still just fine, if I hooked the drive up via ribbon cable vs USB. Since learning that, I've rescued the data directly off "failed" USB drives many times using an ATA connection -- in fact, I can't recall that ever *not* working (though I'm sure it's jus ta matter of time)

Since I have a big pile of old PATA drives (and they are cheap in lots on eBay) I've been experimenting with an "external" (front panel drive slot) ATA connector that cost a few bucks at monoprice.com (a cheap source for cables/connectors, with a great rep among hardware geeks). Thus far it hasn't let me down at al. Of course, you have to power down fully before connecting/disconnecting ATA drives, but that's really not such a hassle, if you routine poke around inside your box.

This probably isn't of much interest to most folks, running newer motherboards, since TB HDDs run so cheap, but since AK has a big interest in older hardware, he may find it useful. I still consider a single internal ribbon cable more reliable (and almost as convenient, if you use knurled finger nuts or leave your case cover screws off entirely), but it's good to know what's out there.

[Analog Kid]

Orph,

LOL, I'm working with older hardware because Mr. Wallet sez so!