Win2K and large ext USB hard drives

[packman 0]

Is there still a 135GB hard drive size limitation, under Windows 2000, or has that now been overcome somehow?

 

The reason I ask is that, for backup purposes, I'm thinking of possibly getting a 250GB external USB-connected hard drive, in order to make an image, from time to time, of the root partition of the hard drive that's in my PC. (That's an image, ie an imagefile, not a clone).

 

I'm also wondering whether Ghost 2003 can successfully write and restore such an image. In Ghost 2003's 'Options', the inference is that Ghost can image to external USB memory devices.

 

Before imaging to the external drive, I would partition it. Again, any idea how you'd do that?

 

[Wilhelmus 1]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098/EN-US/

Quote:

Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and earlier versions of Windows 2000 do not support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) as defined in the ATA/ATAPI 6.0 specification.

 

So, if you are using Service Pack 4, there should be no this limit any more.

[packman 0]

Hey, thanks for that. That's good news, as I'm using Win2K with SP4. In fact, using that Microsoft KB article, I've confirmed that 48-bit LBA support is currently set in my Registry.

 

I still need to find out about the reliability of Ghost 2003, to write and read from an external USB drive, and also how to partition that drive in the first place. Anyone?

 

 

[DosFreak 2]

I've been using 250GB drives in Windows 2000 since 2002 so yeah it works.

 

As for Ghost and External USB drives.

 

I mostly use Acronis and that works fine. The last time I did bother to use Ghost was with Ghost32 on BARTPE and of course that worked. I can't say if other versions of Ghost will work fine or not....although I'm sure the DOS version will work fine with the appropriate DOS USB driver loaded.

 

 

[jmmijo 1]

Adding my $0.02 worth, I'm using an older 200GB IDE in an external USB enclosure and it works fine too with Win 2k with SP4 installed.

 

Interestingly enough, when I recently re-installed Win 2k during the boot process to the setup, it gave me multiple choices to install to including that same external USB drive, hmm, I wonder just how slow the booting would have been