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Windows not recognizing all hard drive space

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - Windows not recognizing all hard drive space

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alperin   05-16-2006 at 06:30:37 PM

I just purchased a 250 gig Western Digital drive and windows is only recognizing 127 gigs after a format. My specs are:
Win xp pro sp2
Asus a7n8x mother board with latest bios (1010)
both onboard ata slots used on motherboard therefore WD drive is connected via a pci raid controller

Also on startup, all 250 gigs are recognized before windows starts to load.

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BaronMatrix   05-16-2006 at 07:08:29 PM
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I had that problem. I had to install the nVidia SATA driver. Is the drive SATA?

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HoldenMcGroin   05-16-2006 at 07:09:13 PM
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What version of windows are you running?

You should try partition magic or some other bootable partitioning program to divide up that hard drive before you load anything onto it. I've tried loading service pack 2 or whatever it was for XP to reclaim lost space on a 200GB hard drive and I had nothing but trouble with all the files on that partition. Tried the same thing by partitioning before loading the OS, had no problem.

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jtt283   05-16-2006 at 07:39:25 PM
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By mentioning that both onboard ATA slots are used, I am assuming this is NOT a SATA drive.
In any case, it sounds like it may be a configuration issue for the PCI RAID card. You may need to enable LBA mode in its BIOS. WinXP SP2 is able to see and work with all of a drive that size, although you may need to make a minor registry tweak. I don't remember it off the top of my head, but the Microsquishy Knowledge Base should have it for you.
If you allocate the visible 127GB of the drive, you may be able to use something like Partition Magic to extend that partition to the remainder of the drive once you make the settings changes.

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HoldenMcGroin   05-16-2006 at 07:53:16 PM
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Quote :

You may need to enable LBA mode in its BIOS. WinXP SP2 is able to see and work with all of a drive that size, although you may need to make a minor registry tweak. I don't remember it off the top of my head, but the Microsquishy Knowledge Base should have it for you.
If you allocate the visible 127GB of the drive, you may be able to use something like Partition Magic to extend that partition to the remainder of the drive once you make the settings changes.



That's what I was talking about with SP2. However, my files on the reclaimed space never were quite the same. Problem with videos always fading in and out, pictures wouldn't load, vid and pics sometimes arbitrarily closing, all sorts of glitches that were gone when I reloaded and claimed my disk space before windows found it.

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The_Prophecy   05-16-2006 at 09:30:57 PM
- 0 +

Quote :

I just purchased a 250 gig Western Digital drive and windows is only recognizing 127 gigs after a format. My specs are:
Win xp pro sp2
Asus a7n8x mother board with latest bios (1010)
both onboard ata slots used on motherboard therefore WD drive is connected via a pci raid controller

Also on startup, all 250 gigs are recognized before windows starts to load.



I remember when i got my 160gb maxtor, I had to use a tool provided by Maxtor to format the drive in order to get windows to see all of the space. Ever since using that tool, all of the drive space can be seen in any system after formatting (off the windows disk or with 3rd party partitioning software), as well as once it gets into Windows. Maybe you need to do the same for your drive, provided WD has such a tool...

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smeghead4269   05-16-2006 at 11:36:04 PM
- 0 +

Quote :


I remember when i got my 160gb maxtor, I had to use a tool provided by Maxtor to format the drive in order to get windows to see all of the space. Ever since using that tool, all of the drive space can be seen in any system after formatting (off the windows disk or with 3rd party partitioning software), as well as once it gets into Windows. Maybe you need to do the same for your drive, provided WD has such a tool...



WD does in fact have such a tool. You can find it here. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same as the Maxtor tool, just slightly modified for WD. The interface for the two programs is pretty much identical.

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