Full drive size not recognized

[Adam]

I installed a new hard drive and windows does not
recognize the full size of the drive. It is reading about
20GB short of where it should be. The drive is a western
digital 160 GB hard drive. Because of the 1024/1000 thing
it should either read 160GB or 149GB. However only 128 GB
show up in disk manager. How could I have windows detect
this excess disk space.

 

[Dell]

Check what the bios thinks the size of the drive is before the OS even boots
(go into bios setup.) If the motherboard isn't seeing the full size, the OS
nearly always won't. Check for a bios update for your system from the
manufacturer of the system (if name brand) or motherboard manufacturer. Most
system BIOS's are limited to 137 GB because it can only support 28 bit
Logical Block Addressing (LBA). If finding a bios update to solve the
problem isn't possible, you're only other alternative is to use a product
like disk manager, which I try to avoid like the plague because of their
history of problems. Another alternative is to use a replacement PCI ATA
controller, which would slow things down. Assuming that your PC hardware
sees the entire 160 GB, then the next issue is what release of WinXP are you
using - XP without SP1 has a limitation of 128 Gb per physical drive. If you
apply SP1, then the OS will see the remaining drive space, but as your OS is
already loaded, your choice is to live with a newly created D: drive to
utilize the remaining space, or use a repartitioning solution like partition
magic to "stretch out" the primary partition to utilize this space. *Note*
if you use partition magic without installing SP1 first, you're liable to
make the drive unusable to WinXP.

 

[Guest]

Bios sees it as 149 GB. It has sp1 installed and is fully
up to date with windows updates. Bah. I guess I have to
settle for 20GB less than I should have.

 

[Guest]

I also should note that this happened after I formatted
and reinstalled windows. Before the reinstall it worked
fine.

 

[JAX]

Sounds like you missed some of your disk in formatting and partitioning.
There should be some un-allocated space there somewhere.

JAX

 

[Guest]

No, when I formatted I did the partition to the maximum
size it would allow.

 

[Dell]

When you reinstalled the OS, did you install WinXP then apply SP1, or
install from a CD that was labeled already as WinXP SP1?