I have an old computer which I still use for off-site backups and tests. I recently installed two new 1.5 TB hard disk drives, and found that the motherboard cannot support HDDs of this size. For example, if I test a hard drive with HD Tune, it runs ok the first 1 TB, but then, marks that the disk is corrupted. Scanning the same drive on a computer with a normal motherboard works fine.
I partitioned the hard drives by keeping the last 600 GB free, so Windows runs fine. The problem is that if I want to test some cool stuff, like software RAID1 through Disk Management, it tries to use the end of the disk, and fails.
Is it possible to do something to "emulate" a smaller hard disk for Windows 2008? In other words, is it possible to force Windows to behave like the disk was 1 TB instead of 1.5 TB?
Answer
Have you considered just using a partitioning tool to create a partition in that space of a type that Windows can't use? Windows would see the space as allocated but not usable by it so wouldn't read or try putting anything there. Not sure offhand if the Microsoft tools can create non-compatible partitions, but parted on a linux boot disk could do it. To prevent future confusion ("what is this partition and is anything important there?") maybe make it an actual ext2/3 partition that's empty or with a small note but easily readable in another computer if necessary.
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