MultiPartitioning 1 sata hard drive

[dragonkx]

I got a 500 gig sata hard drive, i want to split into like a 130 gig and rest as secondary partition. but when i put in windows xp disk and load up to partition screen i only see 130 gigs what happened to the rest? before that it showed that i had like 1,900,000 mb which is like close to 2 tb i beleive. i formatted 900,000 to 1 percent then i relized that it was too much then i restarted , after that it only showed 130 gigs and no other free space, any ideas on how to fix this problem, or u think my hard drives gone, its a brand new hard drive too lol

 

[Paperdoc]

My guess is you have the original XP install disk. Support for "48-bit LBA", which means for hard drives over 128 GB, was only added to XP with Service Pack 1 and later. If you really want to set your system up so that the first bootable Partition is only 128 GB with Windows XP installed there, and then use the rest of the drive for a second Partition, that's not hard.

Let Windows XP install as usual. It will create the 128 GB Partition and install itself. Then go to the Microsoft Windows Update site and download and install Service Pack 2. (Skip SP1. If you want to go all the way, try for the new SP3, but read first on-line comments about any bugs in it.) This will update your XP on the hard drive, but the original install disk still will have no new updated information.

Now when you boot in the updated Windows XP and go to Disk Management, you will find that your big HDD has one active bootable Partition, plus a whole bunch of unallocated space. Right-click on the unallocated space and tell it to Partition it into one large drive, then Format it. When done you'll have a new D: drive in My Computer with about 320 GB of empty space.

If instead you want to get an install disk that has all this built in and re-start with a new install from it, the process is a little more complicated. Basically you start from a working install of the old XP, then download a bunch of instructions, some utilities, and all of the latest updates to XP. This is all legaz and the Microsoft Website, among others, gives instructions for this process called "Slipstreaming". You end up building an image on your hard drive of a new install disk with SP2 already included, then burn it to your own new CD or DVD. That creates an updated Windows XP Install disk. You then re-install from it. Now, besides having the updated XP on your hard drive with 48-bit LBA support and a whole bunch of other updates, you also have that built into your new install disk for next time you need to re-install. Or, you can buy a new version of XP from someone.

But for what you said you wanted to do, you don't have to Slipstream a new XP Install disk. You can work just from the original disk and update the version on your machine. The next time you need to re-install, you'll be repeating the isntall-then-update routine again.

 

[dragonkx]

thanks for the input but yeah it was because i had service pack 1 it was a fresh reboot thats why it wasnt detecting the full 500, had to remember that the hard way.