hard drive space

[heavymtl]

i have a gigabyte ep35-ds3r mobo ..2 gigs of ballistix ram 1066....9600gt 512 megs....western digital (main drive) wd2500aaks sata 2 hard drive...i also have a 200 gig maxtor sata 1 hard drive....on an older system i had i could see ALL my space as c drive....on this new system i have i see about 130 gigs of space....i am thinking this is a bios issue?.....i dont understand how come i dont see all my space as c drive ....thanx for any help

 

[bc4]

Install the latest service packs for your os. Tell us what os you are using and we could probably tell you how to get everything back to normal but it sounds to me that you installed XP (or older) with no service packs and it is limited to seeing 128 gig

 

[heavymtl]

sorry...i have windows xp pro....it has sp3 in now...when i install it i have to go do the updates from 1 to 3....funny thing is that the same os i have i have installed on an older machine that the board went out in....and with that sata 1 maxtor it saw the full space when installing...on this machine it doesn't

 

[bc4]

open up disk management by clicking run, then typing
diskmgmt.msc and pressing enter. Now describe how it looks, (it being XP), it probably sees the whole drive but only has the first 128 gig's allocated.

Its been awhile and I can't remember if XP will allow you to extend the partition or if you need another program to do it. I do know that you can create a second partition out of the unallocated space, just not sure about the details

 

[Crashman]

sorry...i have windows xp pro....it has sp3 in now...when i install it i have to go do the updates from 1 to 3....funny thing is that the same os i have i have installed on an older machine that the board went out in....and with that sata 1 maxtor it saw the full space when installing...on this machine it doesn't

no, XP prior to SP1 always had that problem. You might be mistaken, the old instalation might have been SP1. You can expand your partition with a program such as Partition Magic, or you can just make a second partition in the empty space using windows disk manager.

 

[Paperdoc]

bc4 and Crashman are on the right track. Original XP Pro did NOT support 48-bit LBA, which is what you need to make a HDD volume over 127 GB. In order to install it in the first place, you probably Partioned and Formatted the HDD as the first step of installation, and the Partition step is where the size of the volume is set. Upgrading to SP1, 2, and/or 3 afterwards does NOT re-size the drive.

AFAIK, Windows will NOT allow you to expand the C: (boot) drive to add unallocated space, so you cannot do this in Disk Manger. (Note, though, that Windows Disk Manager will allow expansion on any non-boot volume.) I hear, though, that Partition Magic can do it for you. As Crashman says, the altrnative is to use Disk Manager to create a second partition in the unallocated space and use it as a separate drive. Since you have upgraded to SP3, the new partition will not be limited to 127 GB max.

Check the post by cjl in this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246631-32-removing-partition-adding-windows-partition

He / she details a command-prompt procedure under Vista that he says can expand even the C: drive. I have not tried it, nor do I know whether it can be done in XP.