Is Xp Limited to 2 TB (Terabyte) Partition ?

Hello Everybody ,Recently My Uncle Bought me 2 X 2 terabyte Harddisk So I immediately installed Then in My cabinet , But after starting my Pc i was Shocked yo That Only 2 TB Space was Detected After that I called up Freind Who Told me that 64 Bit Version Of Xp Is requires to recognize the larger hard drive space. Is all These thing True , have you ever heard Heard About Such limitations Please Help to Solve These Problem Thanks in Advance

Yes, the XP-32 2 TiB limit is per-volume,There is a limit to the total number of sectors that a MBR partition table can have. With the standard 512K sectors, that limit is about 2TB, which would be inclusive of all partitions on the drive/array. The partition table has a count of the start and end sectors of each partition, so you can not create a 2TB partition and then have another beyond that on a larger than 2TB drive. Unless of course your OS can see a GPT partition. As far as Windows goes support for GPT partitions started with XP64 and server 2k3.The 2TB volume size is a limit of the MBR partition - not Vista, XP, NTFS, Linux, 32bit, 64bit, etc, etc. The MBR structure only supports 4 primary partitions (more if you use extended volumes), the GPT partitioning scheme can support up to 128 partitions in Windows. Three common means of exceeding the 2TB limit in a single volume is:

1. RAID controller that supports LBA64.
2. Use dynamic disks or an application like unRAID or Windows Home Server that essentially aggregates your physical volumes by using dynamic volumes. I personally feel this is the least desirable and secure method.
3. Use GPT volumes.

You can combine two of the items above as well -
Only Windows XP x64, Server 2003 SP1 and all versions of Vista can read/write GPT partitions, and only Vista systems with EFI can boot from GPT partitions. That's usually not an issue, though, since not many people boot from their large data arrays.

In theory, the maximum NTFS volume size is (2^64) -1 clusters. However, the maximum NTFS volume size as implemented in Windows XP Professional is (2^32)-1 clusters. For example, using 64 KiB clusters, the maximum NTFS volume size is 256 TiB minus 64 KiB. Using the default cluster size of 4 KiB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TiB minus 4 KiB. (Both of these are vastly higher than the 137GB limit in unpatched Windows XP due to lack of 48-bit LBA hard drive addressing support) Because partition tables on master boot record (MBR) disks only support partition sizes up to 2 TiB, dynamic or GPT volumes must be used to create bootable NTFS volumes over 2 TiB.

NTFS has a limitation, not Windows. Windows has got around the limitation by using GUID Partition Tables.In computer hardware, GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. It is a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a replacement for the PC BIOS, one of the few remaining parts of the original IBM PC. EFI uses GPT whereas BIOS uses a Master Boot Record (MBR).

There should be no need to carve the array into 2tb luns and rejoin it using software raid, under your latest configuration its not all happening in hardware and even using M$ software raid as a JBOD is still going to give you a performance hit. Also (according to the docs for your card), using auto carving will give you a performance hit as well.

Creating a single LUN and presenting it to windows 'should' give you a disk in disk manager the size of the LUN. It 'should' be split into 2 pieces, the first being 2tb and the second the rest of the disk. If you don't get that, you need to go back to your card configuration again.

Once you do have the correct presentation to Windows; if you right click on the disk in disk management there is an option to "Convert to GPT volume" or somesuch; if you select this it will change the disk display to show one chunk of unused space the size of the array and let you create a primary partition as big as the available space (up to 18 exabytes).

GUID partition table
The GUID partition table (GPT) disk partitioning style supports volumes up to 18 exabytes in size and up to 128 partitions per disk, compared to the master boot record (MBR) disk partitioning style, which supports volumes up to 2 terabytes in size and up to 4 primary partitions per disk (or three primary partitions, one extended partition, and unlimited logical drives). Unlike MBR partitioned disks, data critical to platform operation is located in partitions instead of unpartitioned or hidden sectors. In addition, GPT partitioned disks have redundant primary and backup partition tables for improved partition data structure integrity.

• On the Volumes tab in the disk properties dialog box in Disk Management, disks with the GPT partitioning style are displayed as GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks, and disks with the MBR partitioning style are displayed as Master Boot Record (MBR) disks. You can perform the same tasks on GPT disks as you can on MBR disks with the following exceptions:
• On x86-based computers running Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and on x64-based computers, the operating system must reside on an MBR disk. Other hard disks can be either MBR or GPT.
• On Itanium-based computers, the operating system loader and boot partition must reside on a GPT disk. Other hard disks can be either MBR or GPT.
• You cannot move GPT disks to x86-based computers running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003. However, you can move GPT disks from either x86-based computers running Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or x64-based computers to Itanium-based computers running Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP, or vice versa.
• You cannot move a GPT disk with an Itanium-based version of Windows from Itanium-based computers to either x86-based computers running Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or x64-based computers, and then boot that operating system. GPT disks that are used in non-Itanium-based computers must be used for data storage only.
• You can have both MBR and GPT disks in a single dynamic disk group. You can also have a mix of basic GPT and MBR disks, which are not part of disk groups. You can create mirrored, striped, spanned and RAID-5 volumes using a combination of MBR and GPT disks, but the MBR cylinder alignment restriction may cause some difficulties in creating mirrored volumes. Always mirror the MBR disk to the GPT disk to avoid cylinder alignment difficulties.
• You can convert an MBR disk to a GPT disk and vice versa only if the disk is empty.
• Mirroring the EFI System partition is not supported. Instead, you must clone the EFI System partition using the bootcfg command.
• You cannot use the GPT partitioning style on removable media, or on cluster disks that are connected to shared SCSI or Fibre Channel buses used by the Cluster service.

Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 2000 have a 2TB limitation per disk device. To work around this, please follow these simple steps. Windows Server 2003, Vista and Mac OS does not have this limitation.

If RAID is larger than 2TB, configure using multiple 2TB Volumes and then use Windows to Span them together. This will end up with one drive letter of the full capacity of the RAID.

If the RAID has an existing RAID set already, you will need to delete it to get a fresh start. This will erase all the data on the RAID. Here is how: Goto RaidSet Functions > Delete Raid Set.

To Create multiple 2TB RAID sets:

1. 1) Create the RAID Set under RaidSet Functions by selecting all of the drives.
   
   
   • Create multiple Volume Sets under the VolumeSet Functions
   • Select the desired Volume Raid Level
   • Set the Select Volume Capacity to 2199GB
   • Set Greater Two TB Volume Support to No
   • Set Volume Initialization Mode to No Init (if applicable)*
   • Check the Confirm the Operation box
   • Click Submit
   
   
   Repeat this step until all of the space are assigned.
   * By setting the Volume Initialization Mode to No Init will result in immediate availability of the RAID set, no need to wait for long initialization time.
   
2. 2)In Windows Disk Management, make these volumes as Dynamic Disks and span them together to make one large disk. Spanning is recommend as oppose to striping. Striping in this configuration requires more system overhead and will actually reduce performance. Use Spanning.