josh said:
I recently purchased a 160 gig hard drive and installed windows xp pro with
sp2 on it. When installing windows it told me it could only let me use
134gig not the full 160. How can I make it to let me use the whole drive. To
make it notice the full space?
A drive bigger than 128 GB (binary measure, 137 decimal billion) needs
support for '48 bit LBA' so as to be able to give a unique address to
each sector of the drive. This may need an upgrade to BIOS or
controller, and certainly needs XP at SP1 state or later.
Also I am pretty sure the initial setup program on the XP CD does not
handle 48 LBA. A single partition that size does not make sense anyway.
If you have SP1 and the BIOS has the size right, start over, making sure
you hit ESC when asked where, so you can delete the present partition
and make a new one. , Setup at a modest size, enough for system and
programs (say 20GB), then when the system is installed, Control Panel -
Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk Management and look lower
right for the graphic of the drive. R-click in Unallocated space and
Create Partition, which will be able to use the rest of the drive