XP SP2 - hard drive size limit 137 GB and other minor woes

[John Fuchs-Chesney]

I'm running a Shuttle SN85G4 with a WD 2500JB 250 GB hard drive. I installed
XP and updated to SP2.

The drive shows up as having 127 GB in My Computer and shows as having 105
GB unallocated in Computer Management/Disk Management.

I've searched my registry and I do not find any entry for "EnableBigLba".

Any ideas how I can fix this?

The Shuttle is new - so I'm guessing the bios is up to date. I would not
know just from looking at the rev anyway.

I saw some advice that a utility like partition magic might solve the
problem - but I'm reluctant to mess with NTFS. Any advice on that?

Finally - small thing - the hard drive shows up as F: (because some card
reader and such grabbed C:, D:, E) - any ideas how to change that so the HDD
is back to C: - or shall I just live with it?

Many thanks! ~ jfc.

 

[LVTravel]

If you installed XP and it did not have at least SP1 on the CD you won't be
able to use the CD to partition the HD larger than 131 GB. Original XP had
a limit on the size of the hard disk.

You have three possibilities now.

1. Use Disk Manager to create a second partition and then format it on
the drive and use it as a "second" hard disk.

2. Purchase Partition Magic and use it to extend the XP partition now on
the drive to the full size of the drive.

3. Slipstream the SP2 update into the XP CD and then boot from the new CD
and repartition and format the drive. You can download Autostreamer from
here
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=188337
and it makes the job of slipstreaming easy. (By the way, if you ever need
to rebuild the hard drive on the computer or do a repair install, you will
need the slipstreamed CD since you can't use a pre SP2 CD to "update" a SP 2
install.)