So I (31die) spent a "fun" hour or two trying to figure this out:
I was downloading as usual, and of a sudden I got a pop-up message indicating a delayed write to one my my 200GB drives failed. Uh-oh.
Poke at it for a while and realize that I had put enough data on it that I was cresting the 128GB point, which is the most current limit on HD size. Western Digital addresses this by including a controller card that understand big drives, and pretends to your system that the drives are SCSI -- I guess the addressing limitation is only from IDE drives.
So I had installed both the 200GB drives on said controller card, while two 80GB drives are on the motherboard, as well as the DVD and CD-RW. The whole point of this confuration was to allow me to use the monster drives.
Poke and dig at it for a while, and it turns out there is a WinXP/SP1 registry variable that lets you enable "48-bit LBA", which I guess is the fix that extends IDE capacity yet again. I have a MB bios which supports it, so I enabled. Of course, I shouldn't have to do this, because the controller card is supposed to hide all this unpleasantness. Sure enough, it didn't fix anything.
WD tells you to install their driver for the card, but when I installed the card in the system WinXP happily recognized it. I tried to update the driver to the one WD provided, but WinXP informed me that the driver it was using was already the most current or most suitable for my hardware or whatever.
As an experiment I decided to bully the OS into using the latest WD (actually a rebraded Promise Technology) drive for the IDE controller card. I told it to install the specific driver I was pointing it at, whether it thinks it knows better than me or not.
Lo and behold, everything works now. Verrrrrry tedious. I have a feeling it comes down to something stupid, like the current WD driver for the card isn't signed by Microsoft, so Microsoft will always prefer the outdated signed driver or something.
Anyway, it works, and it is a fix for a problem other people are having I think. I'm tossing it at you as a somewhat incoherent story with the thought that maybe you can jam it up as a "31die relates this rambling story in the hopes it may help others" post to black-coffee or something.
I'd put it on the eldie-blog, but apparently that isn't even indexed by search engines...