Seagate capacity problem - Not bios or OS

[dmm108]

This is my first visit to these forums, and I could use some help.

I needed to replace the drive in a 200GB Maxtor external case. Maxtor assured me that I could use any size 3.5 drive I could buy. I bought two drives to try, a Western Digital 250GB drive and a Seagate 7200.9 300GB drive, both parallel ATA drives.

I installed the WD drive first. Partition Magic showed the correct capacity, I formatted a small partition FAT32 and ran a few write tests. I then installed the Seagate. Partition Magic only saw about the 137GB limit that you would expect with pre-48 bit systems. I am running XP with Service pack 2, I obviously can address more than 137GB, since the WD drive showed its full capacity of 250GB (I know it's less but that is another thread, for the sake of this discussion let's ignore that), and I had been using the Maxtor 200GB drive happily until I destroyed it. The drive connects to my laptop through USB 2.0. I tried the jumper both on cable select and master with the same results.

I'm completely stumped, i've been able to find no similar experiences in searching the web, so I'm open to suggestions. Seagate's disc wizard which came with the drive also only showed 137GB of capacity.

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.

dmm108

(BTW, the Seagate was significantly faster, writing 1.5GB worth of files in 1 min 5 seconds as compared to 1 min 50 seconds for the Western Digital. Turning off the on-drive cache increased the time 15 seconds for the WD and about 30 seconds for the Seagate. The seagate had 16M compared to 8M of cache for the WD. The Seagate was also significantly hotter. While both drives were manufactured recently, this particular WD drive first appeared in 2003. )

[glc]

Can you put the drives in a desktop computer with a confirmed 48 bit bios and see the whole capacity?

[juppy]

Don't some drives have a jumper on them that limits the overall size to 137 gig?

[glc]

That jumper limits them to 32gb.

[juppy]

Oh, okay, my bad then. I was thinking it was 137. Oops.

[dmm108]

I tried the drive externally with both a Mac G5 and an XP desktop machine with the same results, then tried it internally in the PC with also the same results. I exchanged it for another instance of the same drive, and had no trouble reading it.

What was somewhat strange is that the 1st drive was apparently misshipped, as the package states ST3300631A as the model, but the drive actually was ST3300622A, which is a later design, 7200.9 as opposed to 7200.8. The new drive actually was the 7200.8 drive matching the label on the box. It runs a bit slower than the original, but I can see the whole drive.

Thanks for the help.

dmm108