Quote Originally Posted by JCoyote
You can fix that HD issue with Widows 2000 FYI, I have done it before. I only had to abandon 2000 because my CD got damaged.

However, if you go to the right places, you could get a copy of XP x64 Edition which is probably the best Windows out there right now. It's fundamentally a variation of Server 2003, so it lacks a lot of the release issues of other versions.
XP has that issue too prior to SP1. Something about the length that the OS assumes the addresses on the drive are - it might've been 24-bit and was upgraded to 32 for the larger drives, I simply can't remember the exact details. Anyway, it caused me AWFUL hard drive problems this past time I reinstalled, as I actually tried to access that drive before installing SP1. Basically, half of my huge hard drive (which was mostly full) showed up on my next scandisk check as orphaned files: apparently my attempt to write to the drive overwrote a huge chunk of the FAT for the drive, likely b/c of the OS just assuming it had 24-bit memory addresses. I had no idea of why this had happened or that the problem existed, until I read about it on a troubleshooting website

As for XP x64 edition... I've been running XP Pro forever now, but somewhere along the line I did end up upgrading to a 64 bit AMD processor. Will I notice any differences if I upgrade to x64 edition, and how much of a pain is it likely to be for me to do that at this point?