Harddrive issue

[Simpletown]

I have a WD 250 gig ATA IDE harddrive.
I installed WINXP and it recignizes like 137 gigs of it, I am wondering how to get the rest?

 

[winbob]

Simpletown,

The BIOS in your MOBO is limited to recognizing that as the MAX for a HD. See if there is a BIOS upgrade for your MOBO that will allow recognition of newer higher capacity drives. Check the board manufacturer's website.

 

[old tek]

Might have to get a patch pgm. that load's before windows...They fool the cmos and sort of translate for it sort of....the maker of drive used to ship the program's.. but now you have to ask for it check WD website

 

[/\/\r.Abdul]

OMG this is the fifth time i have answered one of these ok listen and listen good XP has a limit of 137gb. ok so put on SP1 and delete the 137 gb partition then make a parition of 250gbs. SP1 supporst up 4 terabytes. i wanna test that with RAID . i'll need a fair few drives and a damn good PSU but i think it can be done.

 

[JohnWill]

A BIOS from late 2002 or better and XP-SP1 is what you need to recognize the full capacity of the drive.

 

[Simpletown]

Before I do anything drastic would I need to reformat on both options? I have SP2 and I will update my drivers as we speak.

 

[Triple6]

When Windows installs it only can create a max 127Gb partition without Service Pack 1(or 2). Once its installed you can expand the partition with something like Partition Magic to the full size, after installing at least Service Pack 1. Or you can create a second partition on the drive using Disk Management in XP.

You can also use a third party utility to paritiion and format the drive prior to installing Windows XP (without SP1). These are usually free from the manufacturer of the hard drive.

This all assumes your computer's BIOS can see the full size of the drive. If it cannot you need to update your BIOS. After updating the BIOS you will still need to reinstall Windows, use Partition Magic, or create a second partition to get the rest of the space back.