Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
I have an older ('05) Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop. I recently put a WD 320GB drive in it but didn't realize it didn't support 48 bit LBA and no bios updates. I installed XP Pro anyway even though it showed only 134GB in setup. I made a couple partitions as usual and went on. Once I had windows installed I looked in the drive manager and as far as I know it showed the same two partitions I setup in the beginning and nothing else. The strange thing was that later on it showed the rest of the drive in unformatted form. I'm pretty sure this was after installing SP3, which makes no since because I thought that support for larger drives came in SP2. In any case I formatted it and it looked all good. I read that even though it shows, the addressing will be messed up due to no 48 bit LBA support so the date might become corrupt. Well I haven't used the computer much (have desktop also) and today installed some win updates and restarted. Well it didn't restart. It would go to the screen where you can select the way you want it to start because of a bad shutdown (safe mode, normal, last good config etc. ) so I try all of those and nothing works.
I ran the long and short versions of two different HDD checking tools from CD and they found nothing. I ran memtest and all was fine. I ran check disk and it said "one or more unrecoverable problems". So I dunno if widows is just corrupt or there is a disk problem that caused the corruption was not detected in the checks. I dropped the old drive back in and its back online since I left the old one fully loaded in case I needed to throw it back in.
Okay, sorry all that was probably not needed. My question is since my computer doesn't support 48 bit LBA will this affect my using this same 320GB drive in an external USB 2. 0 enclosure? Many of those I'm seeing don't even show support for 320GB. My guess is that this will have no affect since its not using the IDE ATA-6 internal interface. I just wanted to varify this before buying an enclosure. I'm thinking I will hook the new drive up this way and check it out some more to make sure its okay and then either wipe and sell it or just use it this way and then buy a 120GB for the main drive.
I ran the long and short versions of two different HDD checking tools from CD and they found nothing. I ran memtest and all was fine. I ran check disk and it said "one or more unrecoverable problems". So I dunno if widows is just corrupt or there is a disk problem that caused the corruption was not detected in the checks. I dropped the old drive back in and its back online since I left the old one fully loaded in case I needed to throw it back in.
Okay, sorry all that was probably not needed. My question is since my computer doesn't support 48 bit LBA will this affect my using this same 320GB drive in an external USB 2. 0 enclosure? Many of those I'm seeing don't even show support for 320GB. My guess is that this will have no affect since its not using the IDE ATA-6 internal interface. I just wanted to varify this before buying an enclosure. I'm thinking I will hook the new drive up this way and check it out some more to make sure its okay and then either wipe and sell it or just use it this way and then buy a 120GB for the main drive.
