Help! Hard Drive problem?...or

[jagnet]

Ok, so I just finished a build, started up the newborn bundle of power and all is well.. except that is, when I began to install the OS something odd was noticed. I installed Windows XP Pro SP2. On the blue screen at the beginning of the process when you format and all that jazz, I was creating a new partition since the HDD is a brand new one. The HD is a Western Digital Caviar SE 16MB 250GB SATA. What I noticed while creating the partition was that the Hard Drive is only being detected as having 137GB of total available space... I partitioned the drive and installed Windows without any problems at all and when I go to My Computer and hover the cursor over the C: it still says 137 total space.. ??!?!? I double checked to make sure the cables are properly connected and they are so I am lost, is it just a bad drive? or is it something I'm doing or not doing?? Any help is greatly appreciated.

The system specs are as follows:
ASUS M2N32 SLI - Deluxe WIFI Edition
AMD ATHLON64 X2 5600 + (2.8GHZ)
2GB Kingston RAM
eVGA Geforce 8600GT (256MB) PCI-E
Western Digital Caviar SE 16mb 250GB SATA 2 3gb/s
etc.

As I said before, everything else seems to be working and being detected perfectly...!?

Thanks in advance!

-Jagnet

 

[yay]

sorry i cant be of more help, but i do believe there is a setting under bios that fixes this, im sure of it, so if you are bios literate dive in and look around.

EDIT: setting i was thinking of is about LBA. Also check the jumper on the back of the drive and make sure its on auto.

 

[MrLinux]

Might be worth checking your version of XP you are trying to install really is SP2.

 

[jitpublisher]

Agree with MrLinux....your version of XP is apparently not SP2. Update your XP installation and you will be able to see the whole drive and extend your partition.

 

[evongugg]

How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013/en-us

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Windows XP RTM (i.e. original version, no service packs) cannot recognize IDE/SATA drives larger than 137GB/127GiB. Your CD-ROM is evidently Windows XP RTM.

You have 3 choices on how to fix this:

1. Upgrade Windows XP to SP1 or higher (SP2 recommended but not required). Go into Disk Management, you will see your 250GB drive with a 137GB partition on it. Right-click the blank area and create a second partition. Once it's formatted, this partition will now have it's own drive letter (probably D: or E: ) of about 110GB. This will enable you to use the entire 250GB of the drive, but it will be split on the two drive letters.

If you want all the space on a single drive letter, then:

2. Upgrade Windows XP to SP1 or higher (SP2 recommended but not required). Use a 3rd-party partition resizing tool like Partition Magic or GParted to resize the 137GB C: drive to 250GB.

or

3. Create a SP2-integrated Windows XP installation CD-ROM using NLite. This will make a CD-ROM that has SP2 already on it instead of the XP RTM version you currently have. Reinstall Windows XP using the SP2-integrated CD-ROM, and you'll be able to create a 250GB partition during Windows setup.

Do NOT mess with the EnableBigLba registry key as the Microsoft KB article says. You will create more problems than you will solve.

 

[jagnet]

thanks SomeJoe7777! Worked perfectly, i'll keep the 3rd option in mind for future installs.