big chunk missing from hard drive

[strikex2]

my computer is currently running on x64 edition. I decided to go back to the regular xp pro cause of driver issues and whatnot. so anyways, i inserted the xp pro cd and booted from the cd. The problem came up at the place where i'm suppose to reformatt my hard drive, repartition and all that other stuff. I have a Western Digital Caviar 320gb SATA hard drive. However, according to the info on the partitioning screen, i only had 131,357mb total. what happen to my other 189gbs? just for the heck of it, i inserted my xp x64 cd and did the same thing. with the 64x cd, my hard drive shown to have 305,243mb, which is normal. so i guess it only happends with normal xp installation cd. what exactly is happening here? where is the problem coming from and what can i do to fix it.

thanks for the help.

 

[choirbass]

i think the reason for the limitation youve run into with normal x86 windows xp, is because before service pack 1, there was no support for hard drives larger than 137 GB over an ATA interface, but if you download the latest service pack after installing, it should have 48-bit addressing, and fix the barrier problem, and you should then have your whole hard drive capacity back again

 

[Special-Forces]

I have the exact same problem. I have 131 GB being seen by XP Pro SP1 when it should show slightly less than 250GB (whatever 1,000,000 bytes turns out to be). And it seems it's the same solution, upgrade to SP2.

 

[strikex2]

thanks for all of your help guys. the issue has been resolved.