Rock said:
What version of XP is the installation CD? It needs to be at SP1 or above
for large hard drive support. If it's not at that level, create an
installation CD that has SP2 integrated on it, in a process called
slipstreaming. Here are some links on how to do that. Autostreamer makes
it easier.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/
Autostreamer
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1092632287/1
http://www.simplyguides.net/guides/using_autostreamer/using_autostreamer.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562
FrJen:
The information & suggestions provided you by Rock are correct, but let me
flesh it out a bit perhaps to make things a bit more clearer to you...
There are two basic requirements for the XP operating system (OP) to
recognize the full-capacity of hard drives > 137 GB (approx)...
1. The motherboard must support this capability, and,
2. The XP OP must contain Service Pack 1 or 2 (SP1 or SP2) when it is
installed.
Your motherboard surely supports large-disk capability so that's no problem.
But you probably installed the XP OS that did not contain either SP1 or SP2.
So in that case the OS would recognize only 137 GB (or the 131 GB you
reported) as total disk capacity.
Now if & when you install SP2 (or SP1, although you probably should opt for
SP2) the full capacity of your SATA HDD will be recognized, *but*...
the additional disk space above the present 131 GB will be considered
"unallocated space". It's disk space that you can partition & format using
XP's Disk Management utility (use the Help files for info on DM if you're
not familiar with it) however this means that as a minimum you will have two
partitions - your original 131 GB and another one of about 100 GB (there
are about 232 GB available in a HDD advertised as 250 GB).
So if you can live with two partitions per the above - fine. But if you want
only a single partition encompassing the total disk capacity of your HDD
rather than two partitions then you might want to adopt Rock's suggestion re
creating a "slipstreamed" copy of the XP OS which contains SP2. Using the
Autostreamer program as he suggests will make the process relatively simple.
Note that after you created the slipstreamed CD you will reinstall the
entire XP OS.
Anna
