Large hard drive space issue

[Guest]

I have a 160 gig Maxtor hard drive but in windows XP Pro w/ sp2 it only shows
120 gigs. Where did the other 40 gig go? in my bios setting from the
motherboard it shows it to be 160 gig like it is. Do I need to change
something in windows to get my other 40 gig back?

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

137 gig limit - How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013



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[Guest]

I did this and it still shows 127 gig on the 160 gig hard drive.

Is there something I need to do other than the EnableBigLba that this
support article refers about?

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

160 billion bytes is 149 gig (not 127), so it's ALSO one of those 'marketing ploys' that counts a billion as a gig, AND it's
something else. ( it is true that 137 billion bytes, the lba limit, is 127 gigs, as you are seeing)

My guess would be you need to remove the partition (created during the non-lba condition) on the drive, and start over after the
change to LBA.

If the system drive, do a Clean install. Boot to the XP setup CD, press 'R" for the repair prompt, and run the command DISKPART to
remove the existing partition, and then boot to CD, and run Setup. (Non-system drives can be repartitioned with DISKMGMT.MSC within
Windows)

If my guess is right, you will get 149 gigs out of this, gaining 22 gigs, but I'm afraid the last 21 gigs (160 - 149) are lost to
that 'marketing ploy' that declares a billion is a gig.


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[Guest]

Is there any way to change the partition without doing a clean install again
I have a LOT of data that I don't won't to lose and don't have the means to
back it up. Please tell me there is a miracle.........

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

I've not tried it, but Partition Magic, and few other utilities can enlarge a partition without losing the data. Otherwise you need
a second drive to copy the data to, during the upsize in partition.


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