XP Hard drive detection anomoly

[Guest]

I have a fully-updated xp pro install, running nice and sturdy on my machine,
with 2 maxtor 160 gig SATA drives as my main and backup, and 2 160 gig IDE's
for bulk storage and the majority of my installed files (in order to give xp
PLENTY of room to romp around on the main drive), the thing is, in the past 2
builds (COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KIT except the IDE drives), the same pair of IDE
drives have been recognised by the mobo as 160's but xp will ONLY see them as
120 gig drives, losing me a full 80 gigs of storage all told. The SATA drives
it sees fine. Anyone got any idea why? Please?

 

[Anna]

I have a fully-updated xp pro install, running nice and sturdy on my
machine,
with 2 maxtor 160 gig SATA drives as my main and backup, and 2 160 gig
IDE's
for bulk storage and the majority of my installed files (in order to give
xp
PLENTY of room to romp around on the main drive), the thing is, in the
past 2
builds (COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KIT except the IDE drives), the same pair of
IDE
drives have been recognised by the mobo as 160's but xp will ONLY see them
as
120 gig drives, losing me a full 80 gigs of storage all told. The SATA
drives
it sees fine. Anyone got any idea why? Please?

Is it possible you installed your PATA & SATA drives at different times? In
other words did you first install your PATA drives when XP had been
installed but had *not* yet been upgraded via SP1 and/or SP2? That might
account for the system not recognizing the full capacity of those PATA
drives. (Although it is puzzling that you state only 120 GB has been
recognized. If it's the large-capacity barrier that's the problem here, 127
GB (approx.) should have been recognized.)

Anyway, if it is the large-capacity barrier that's involved, it was only
after you installed SP1 and/or SP2 that you installed the SATA drives so
that their full-capacity was recognized by the system

Access Disk Management and see if the two PATA drives show "unallocated"
disk space of roughly 22 GB. If it does, you can partition/format that
unallocated disk space.
Anna