Hi,

BACKGROUND: I have recently suffered problems during an attempt to fit
a new slave hard-disk drive. The 250Gb (Western Digital Caviar SE 3.5"
IDE) drive was not formatting (50% format then blue screen, crash and
restart), and I was seeing error messages containing the number
'137Gb'. I am aware that this is to do with the 137Gb barrier. My BIOS
is now up-to-date on my Epox 8K7A+ motherboard, as are the highpoint
controller drivers in Windows XP.

CURRENT STATUS: The HDD now works fine (it is seen as a drive, and I
can freely move files to and from it), but I had to use another PC to
format it to NTFS. My question is this!

QUESTION 1: Now that the drive appears to be working fine, am I going
to get to a point in some months/years time where I exceed 137Gb and
suddenly lose all of the contents of the drive!? Obviously this would
be a disaster, and although I suspect unlikely, I am paranoid it may
happen. Or, is the fact that the drive works now enough to know that I can
depend on the entire capacity of it in the future?

QUESTION 2: Furthermore, can you recommend a free utilities/tool that I can
use to properly check that everything is fully OK, to restore my
confidence?

Many Thanks!

Chris

Didn't Western Digital have a major recall recently, or was that
another manufacturer? Perhaps this is related to that problem?

I believe you should also be fine if you were to partition the drive
into 2 partitions less than 137gb each... E.g. 2x~125gb partitions, as
the issues deals with the hard drive controllers in-ability to address
more than 137gb of data. However if you got it working and you can see
all your space you likely shouldn't run into an issue where the data
just "disappears" after you go over the 137gb mark.