250GB SATA II hard drive + drive letter assignment

G

Guest

My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?


Angie
 
M

Maincat

Angie said:
My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?


Angie

Try changing the disk letters in Disk Management. Right click on the drive
and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.
 
G

Ghostrider

Maincat said:
Try changing the disk letters in Disk Management. Right click on the drive
and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.

One cannot change the drive letters of the system drive. The only way
to make the system drive as Drive C under these circumstances is to
disconnect the IDE drive and the USB card reader. Install the SATA drive,
boot WinXP setup from the cdrom drive, and install XP into the SATA drive.
Because the OP is using the original Windows XP, it will partition only
the first 132 GB as Drive C. (The OP might want to consider slipstreaming
SP2 into the original Windows XP).
 
A

Anna

Angie said:
My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?


Angie


Angie:
You have apparently two problems here...

You probably installed the XP OS onto your new SATA HDD while another HDD
was still connected...possibly the previous boot HDD you say "crashed". It's
best to disconnect all HDDs from the system when installing the XP OS.

The second problem is that you did not have SP1 or SP2 installed on your XP
installation CD when you used that CD to install the OS. Because of that the
system detected only the 127.99 GB you mentioned; the remaining disk space
was designated "unallocated".

It would be best if you would "slipstream" SP2 onto your XP installation CD.
Use a simple program like Autostreamer to accomplish this. You can do a
Google search on "autostreamer" to download that free program and obtain
instructions to use it.

If you don't want to go through the slipstreaming process (although it's
quite simple) you can fresh install the XP OS onto the SATA HDD again with
your current XP installation CD, but this time with all other drives
disconnected as indicated above. You could then install SP2 onto your system
and the entire disk space of your 250 GB HDD will be recognized. However,
there will still be that unallocated disk space that you now can format. So
if you can live with two partitions that's another option. But all in all it
would really be better if you would use a slipstreamed XP installation CD
including SP2.
Anna
 
J

Joe Grover

You'll need to reinstall without the USB card readers attached. As
mentioned, your drivespace issue is due to installing XP without SP2
installed, which accesses drives >250GB (you can do so in previous versions
using a registry hack, but that won't help you in text-mode setup while
partioning the system drive).

Follow the posted instructions for creating a CD with SP2 slipstreamed into
it and then reinstall XP with the card reader disconnected so you can
partition your drive to the full capacity and have it be C:.

Joe
 
G

Guest

When I installed WinXP onto my new harddrive, there was no other hard drive
connected to my system. I threw out my old ide hard drive after discovering
it had 3 bad sectors. One of them in the boot sector. I will try unplugging
my floppy with the card readers, and making a slipstream XP SP2 disk. My cd
rom is ide. Will this cause a problem with the drive letter assignment?
Thanks for all you input.

Angie
 
D

DL

If you only have your sata hd, cd rom conected a new win installation will
be to the C drive (your sata)
You can leave the floppy connected, just disconnect card reader and any
other cd/dvd drives
 
R

Rock

When I installed WinXP onto my new harddrive, there was no other hard
drive
connected to my system. I threw out my old ide hard drive after
discovering
it had 3 bad sectors. One of them in the boot sector. I will try
unplugging
my floppy with the card readers, and making a slipstream XP SP2 disk. My
cd
rom is ide. Will this cause a problem with the drive letter assignment?
Thanks for all you input.

Here are some links for slipstreaming SP2. Autostreamer makes it easier.

Slipstream

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/

Autostreamer
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1092632287/1
http://www.simplyguides.net/guides/using_autostreamer/using_autostreamer.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562

There should be no problems with drive letter assignments. After the OS is
installed connect the other drives, and you can assign them the drive
letters you want (except for the floppy which will take A:) through disk
management.
 
L

Lil' Dave

Angie said:
My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?


Angie

The drive letter assignment sounds like old SATA bios with onboard ide.
That is, SATA is taking a back seat to onboard ide. Should be an option in
the bios to remap your SATA drive as primary master ide. The cdrom should
be on the secondary ide. Both ide controllers must be enabled in the bios
for this to function properly.

Anna told how to fix the 128GB limitation problem.
Dave
 
A

Andy

My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?

If you have the ability to create and format an active 250GB primary
partition on the disk using some other means, such as connecting it
temporarily as a slave in another computer, then you can install
Windows XP in the existing partition using a Windows XP CD that does
not contain SP1 or 2. However you should then immediately apply SP1 or
2 in order for the installed Windows XP to properly access the drive
past the 137GB point.
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?

If the partition on the drive already exists when Windows XP setup is
started, Windows setup will assign C to the partition. You can easily
verify this behavior by booting from the Windows XP CD and proceeding
to the screen that shows the partitions on the hard disk.
 
P

Plato

=?Utf-8?B?QW5naWU=?= said:
My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the hard

You need at least XP2 to properly see over a 132 gig HDD.
 
K

Ken Blake, MVP

You need at least XP2 to properly see over a 132 gig HDD.



Sorry, Ed, that's not correct. You need at least SP1, not SP2. And the
boundary is 137GB, not 132.

You also need a motherboard with a BIOS and controller that supports
48-bit LBA (or alternatively, an add-in controller card that does).
 
T

Timothy Daniels

Ken Blake said:
Sorry, Ed, that's not correct. You need at least SP1, not SP2.
And the boundary is 137GB, not 132.

You also need a motherboard with a BIOS and controller that
supports 48-bit LBA (or alternatively, an add-in controller card
that does).


For SP1, is it true that the 48-bit capability is not enabled by
default and must be enabled by the user? If so, how does the user
request that enablement?

*TimDaniels*
 
K

Ken Blake, MVP

For SP1, is it true that the 48-bit capability is not enabled by
default and must be enabled by the user? If so, how does the user
request that enablement?


It's not true as far as I know. But it's been a while since I've seen
an SP1 machine, so I can't be absolutely sure.
 
P

Plato

Sorry, Ed, that's not correct. You need at least SP1, not SP2. And the
boundary is 137GB, not 132.

You also need a motherboard with a BIOS and controller that supports
48-bit LBA (or alternatively, an add-in controller card that does).

Yes Ken, I stand corrected. Many thanks.
 
G

Guest

Thanks for your help. Slipstreaming SP2 into WinXP was extremely easy.
That solved my >137GB harddrive issue. And unplugging my floppy (that
had those card readers built into the physical structure), while installing
Windows fixed the problem with drive letter assignment. It defaulted to c:
just how I wanted. Thanks so much for your help and everyone elses input.

Thanks all,

Angie
 

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