hard drive size not properly detected

Thornblade · 09-01-2007, 11:17 PM

Hi everyone,
Well, I built one gaming machine, and now, almost a year later, I decided to make one for my wife. Problem is, I got her a different hard drive from mine and windows isn't detecting its full size.

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA drive. The build went fine (thank you again, Fozzik!), and when we got into the BIOS at first, it detected the hard drive fine and saw the 320 gigs. Then, we installed Windows from an older xp version disk that we have taken off one of our older computers. She wanted to partition during the install, but it was only seeing 127 gigs. We found this odd and thought maybe it was because the version of Windows pre-dated sp1 and sp2, so we went ahead and installed windows, then did every possible update for it. Still, the BIOS sees the 320, but windows does not.

We decided that maybe the BIOS needed an update, so we tried that too and installed everything off the motherboard CD that we could, to make sure it had all possible drivers. No dice.

Can anyone suggest what else we can do to get Windows to see the right number of gigs on this drive?

rhagz · 09-01-2007, 11:30 PM

You'll need to go in and set partitions. If you install Windows XP without SP1 or SP2 then you cannot use more than 127GB on one partition. Go to disk management and partition the remaining space.

evilsofa · 09-01-2007, 11:49 PM

Yup, this is what happens when you install Windows XP from the original CD without SP1 or SP2.

There's another way to deal with this issue. You can use that original CD, download the SP2 update, and create a new boot CD with WinXP and SP2 that will properly set up the drive (and eliminates other annoyances too). It's called slipstreaming. It's perfectly legal and you just use the CD key from the original CD when installing with the slipstreamed CD.

There are several sites with instructions on how to create the slipstreamed CD, and googling for "windows xp slipstream" will bring them up. These are good ones:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...slipstream.asp
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/Windo...p2-bootcd.html

There's even an batch file that will automatically slipstream SP2 and all post-SP2 patches, but I haven't had occasion to experiment with it yet:

http://smithii.com/slipstream_xpsp2

Thornblade · 09-01-2007, 11:55 PM

Wow, thanks for the quick response!

The slipstreaming thing sounds interesting. I was delighted to see that there was 170 gigs of unallocated space in the disk management tool! Thanks so much for the tip. I think I'm gonna take the easy route and just allocate that space as a partition, even though I initially intended to divide the disk in half.

Now, I need to figure out a way to allocate it as FAT32, not NTFS, so I can put Linux on it for a dual boot system. It's not giving that option to me. Any ideas on how or if I can do that at this point?

You guys are awesome thanks so much!

rhagz · 09-01-2007, 11:56 PM

I'm not sure if you can format 2 partitions on one drive with different file systems. If you could, formatting the partition would be the only way.

Thornblade · 09-02-2007, 12:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhagz

I'm not sure if you can format 2 partitions on one drive with different file systems. If you could, formatting the partition would be the only way.

Poo...I had a feeling that was the case. This has been an interesting learning experience for me! Never again will I use an old version of Windows xp. I should've just put out the money for it, but I thought it was one of those cost saving things - especially since it was a version I was no longer using on any computer, so not breaking any EULA rules.

Oh well... hey, thanks to you both again for helping me out! At least I can move on from this issue that's eaten away half my day!

grayknyght · 09-02-2007, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thornblade

Poo...I had a feeling that was the case. This has been an interesting learning experience for me! Never again will I use an old version of Windows xp. I should've just put out the money for it, but I thought it was one of those cost saving things - especially since it was a version I was no longer using on any computer, so not breaking any EULA rules.

Oh well... hey, thanks to you both again for helping me out! At least I can move on from this issue that's eaten away half my day!

Whoops...missed another post before I posted mine.

Yes, you could put different file formats on different partitions on the same drive, but you can't change the file table without destroying data.

Loopy · 09-02-2007, 04:42 PM

As for slipstreaming I can vouch that it works. I had an old copy of XP and slipstreamed it before I build my new system. It had no problem recognizing and formating both my 250g seagate hardrives.