Less that half of new drive displays in My Computer.

[The Old Fart]

I put a brand new 300GB hard drive into an external USB2 enclosure then use
Partition Magic 8 to change the drive from unallocated space, formatted the
drive & eventually transferred a few large files onto it from one of my
other 2 internal drives. I opened 'My Computer' only to see that it listed
the drives size as 128GB. which is less that half of what it should be
displaying, I opened Partition Magic 8 to see what it said. At the top it
showed the drive listed, without any partitions & said it was 168GB. The
usual box was fringed in yellow & it said it was bad. This drive wasn't
displayed at the bottom at all like as it normally does.

As for the drive being bad I find that I can open files on it & even played
a video file from it without a problem.

A few weeks ago I installed a 250GB drive onto another PC what had XP pro
with SP2 , like this one, without problem. Is there yet another size
barrier for drives over 250GB? If this isn't the problem then do you have
any ideas as to what it might be?


Thanks in advance

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

You must have LBA enabled to see the full size of the Hard drive. LBA
support was included in SP1 and SP2.

In addition, your motherboard has to be able to support larger drives. Your
motherboard may need a BIOS upgrade in order to see the larger drive.


Bobby

 

[Dead Wrong]

What is LBA? Whatever it is I have never gone to enable anything like that
before? Why would PM8 have drive fringed in yellow & say it's bad?

Thanks in advance?

 

[Andy]

Do you know for a fact that the USB enclosure can handle large drives?
Use Disk Management to check on the capacity of the USB disk. If the
capacity is not about 280GB, the enclosure is the problem.