Another thought : could this be because that drive is 200gig and there's still a limit of 137gig in win2k?
Or is that a limit of 137gig per partition and not per total drive size? (I would think so because I could partition the drive just fine and when formatted it did show the total of 200gig available, devided in 4 partitions)

Could this have anything to do with it?

Problem solved. Seemed that it WAS this 137 gig barrier that was causing the problems. In all windows OS'es (except XP with SP1), when the OS tries to access the diskspace above that 137gig, whether it is devided into partitions or not (makes no difference), windows crashes.

Solution : install Intel's Application Accelerator. This utility enables (among others) this 48bit LBA mode.

Use this utility until MS will have the brains to include an update for this in (I hope) SP4 for win2k.

So to anyone who is using win2K and isn't using the application acclerator yet : install it now, because if you'll want to install a new disk (larger than 137gig) into your system in the future and you forget to install IAA then, your system will crash and a completely fresh install will be required to get some life into your PC again.

In my case this wasn't so bad because it was a completely fresh system install to begin with, but if I had installed this disk as a secondary hard drive, it's very well possible that my system would have crashed and destroyed all my data with it.
So be warned!

Note : Intels website makes mention that the IAA utility may not work with Win95, 98 or ME OS'es.

That's great news! I'm glad it wasn't a mobo issue. Do you know if the limit is on partition size or physical device size; i.e. would two 100GB partitions on the 200GB drive have avoided the problem?

-Zeke

would two 100GB partitions on the 200GB drive have avoided the problem?

No, the limit seems to be in the size of the harddisk, not in the size of the partitions.

I had devided that 200gig up into 4 partitions, the biggest being 80gig, just to avoid this problem. Needless to say that didn't work.

It's really quite incredible how badly documented this problem is, especially considering how common it may become in the future when 137+ disks won't be so rare anymore.
Knowing MS, they probably assume that everyone will be using WinXP SP1 (or later) by then.

No way!

Win2k SP3 can also handle disks over 137GB without IAA. You just need a registry hack... It's been mentioned on this board earlier. Or do a search on the Micro$ucks site for 137Gb.

Stig

Win2k SP3 can also handle disks over 137GB without IAA. You just need a registry hack... It's been mentioned on this board earlier. Or do a search on the Micro$ucks site for 137Gb.

I know, I've read that too. But the MS site made mention of possible data loss when using that registry hack. I just thought that the IAA option was safer.

Thanks anyway!

BTW : this is what you posted about it earlier.