Hard Drive reading 1/2 size

[macs312]

My 300 GB drive is recognized as about 140 GB in a new build.

I purchased the drive a few months ago & it has shown accurate size as
the 2nd drive in a system since then (using it with PCI SATA card).
When I used it as the only drive in a new build, the drive isn't
recognized correctly.

GIGABYTE GA-K8NF-9 NVIDIA nForce4
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB
Windows XP pro

This is the first build I've done with the O.S. on SATA. The MOBO has
RAID options, but I disabled them in BIOS. I still suspect the problem
deals with RAID somehow, but I have no clue on where to begin.

Please help.

Thanks,
Mac

 

[Tom Lake]

My 300 GB drive is recognized as about 140 GB in a new build.

I purchased the drive a few months ago & it has shown accurate size as
the 2nd drive in a system since then (using it with PCI SATA card).
When I used it as the only drive in a new build, the drive isn't
recognized correctly.

GIGABYTE GA-K8NF-9 NVIDIA nForce4
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB
Windows XP pro

Do you have SP1 or SP2 applied to XP? If not, then there's your problem.
You need to enable LBA support in XP and 2000 to go beyond 137GB.

See the article here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013/en-us

Tom Lake

 

[Pelysma]

My 300 GB drive is recognized as about 140 GB in a new build.

about 140? I would expect it to show as 128 GB, which is a little over 137
billion bytes. Many systems have a limit at that level, although from your
description yours should not. Most motherboards manufactured since 2002 no
longer have this limit.

The feature that ordinarily causes that limit is the 28-bit LBA
specification, the use of a 28-bit binary number to identify a location on
the disk, which can only distinguish 137 billion memory locations. A newer
specification using 48 bits has a very much higher limit and should last a
few years at least. Since your hardware would seem to be capable of 48-bit
LBA, I'd be looking in the setup program to see if there is an option for
legacy 28-bit addressing somewhere.

 

[Mac]

That was the problem.

I posted the original message as soon as I loaded XP & before I applied
SP2.

I applied SP2 & could then see the non-allocated space with Partition
Magic (also used P.M. to fix the problem so I wouldn't have to
re-install windows).

Thanks for your help.

-Mac