Thanks for the pointers, however the solution was none of the above!
My PC had the latest version of Bios available which was capable of
supporting large hard drives. It also has the latest version of
Windows XP Pro + SP2 which includes the registry fix for using hard
drives greater than 137GB.
I tried both Seagate and Maxtor tools and neither could format the
200GB drive.
I spotted something on the Maxtor site (I think - or was it Seagate)
that mentioned the Intel Application Accelerator. I vaguely remember
that this utility came with my motherboard and so I checked if it was
installed on my PC. It was, so I deinstalled it and hey presto I
could format all 200GB of the new hard drive. The problem was
obviously that I had an old version of IAA installed and this had a
137GB limit! Out of interest, I downloaded the latest version of IAA
from the Intel website and installed it and this also worked okay.
I'm not sure if the IAA is actually making a difference to my PC
performance, one day I will have to get hold of some benchmarking
software and compare performance with and without IAA installed.
Can anyone recommend any good cheap/free benchmarking software that
could be used to measure my hard drive performance?
Regards.
Paul.
