Large Hard Drive in Win XP Pro

[Guest]

I have Win XP Pro. I just installed a Seagate Barracuda IDE, 250 GB, 7200
rpm, 8 MB cache hard drive. It is recognized in the BIOS, but when Windows
loads, My Computer only shows my 80 GB C: drive, no D: drive at all. When I
look at device manager, I see two disk drives. When I check properties and
"populate" the volume, I see the 250 GB drive and it says it is functioning
normally. I've tried updating the driver, and then uninstalling and
rebooting. Still the same results, no D: drive is recognized. (Actually D:
is my dvd drive.) Also, I've checked the jumpers on the drive itself. It is
set to cable select. Any help is greatly appreciated. Please respond to
(e-mail address removed) if you need an email addy. Thanks in advance

 

[mlzielke]

Wndows XP Pro will not recognize more than a 137 GB hard drive until
the service packs are installed. I think this is only a problem with
older PCs, from everything I have read. I just put in a 160 GB hard
drive.....I partitioned the hard drive so that C drive was 60 GB. I
then installed the OS and service pack two. After you have installed
the OS on drive C:, go into control panel/administrative
tools/computer management. On the left side under storage click on
disk management. Scroll down the right side of your screen a bit. You
will see Drive C listed in a little box....there will be a second drive
listed also, in a box right next to Drive C:. Mine is labeled it drive
F. Right click on drive F or whatever yours is, and when the menu
drops down, left click on Format. I formatted mine in NTFS. After
this drive is formatted, it will be good to go. I store all my music
files on this drive, as well as backups of other data. No OS is
necessary on this second partition.

I should note that I used the 6 floppy disks to boot up my
computer.....when you walk through the screens, you will come to one
that allows you to put in how many KB you want to make the primary
partition. I typed in 61440 (kb), which comes out to exactly 60GB.
Also, both my C drive and my F drives are primary partitions. You can
have up to 4 primary partitions on one hard drive.....again, from what
I have read.

This worked like a charm for me. I hope it works as well for you also.
You would probably want to split yours into two 125 GB hard
drives......which is 128000 KB.

Hope this helps.

 

[Guest]

O.K. I finally found an installation program on Seagate's website and it is
now recognized as F: in my computer. Now I just have a quick question. It
is a 250 GB hard drive with nothing on it. It is showing approx. 80 MB of
used space (which I assume is for OS control/recognition), but why does it
show the drive as a 232 GB hard drive. That 18 GB missing. Is there any way
to reformat the disk to get some of it back? Thanks again for any assistance.

 

[Mike Fields]

O.K. I finally found an installation program on Seagate's website and it is
now recognized as F: in my computer. Now I just have a quick question. It
is a 250 GB hard drive with nothing on it. It is showing approx. 80 MB of
used space (which I assume is for OS control/recognition), but why does it
show the drive as a 232 GB hard drive. That 18 GB missing. Is there any way
to reformat the disk to get some of it back? Thanks again for any assistance.

You are dealing with the difference between real gigabytes and
"advertising gigabytes" -- in the advertising world, a gigabyte is
1,000,000,000 bytes - in the real version it is 2**whatever_that_power_is
(sorry - brain fart). Anyway, that is typically the difference - like
64k (64 * 1024 = 65,536) -- the advertising folks would sell it
as 65k (or maybe even 66k). 1 gig is 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,073,741,824
All depends on how you count ;-)

mikey

 

[Ron Martell]

O.K. I finally found an installation program on Seagate's website and it is
now recognized as F: in my computer. Now I just have a quick question. It
is a 250 GB hard drive with nothing on it. It is showing approx. 80 MB of
used space (which I assume is for OS control/recognition), but why does it
show the drive as a 232 GB hard drive. That 18 GB missing. Is there any way
to reformat the disk to get some of it back? Thanks again for any assistance.

That 18 gb is the difference between decimal gigabytes (1 billion
bytes = 1 gigabye) used by hard drive manufacturers and binary
gigabytes (2^30 bytes) used by Microsoft and other software companies
for reporting computer quantities such as RAM, file sizes, and disk
capacities.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm