SATA hard drive showing wrong size?

Question

My 300gb sata hard drive is showing up as only 136gb!
maybe my mobo cant handle the sata2 drive or am i missing something completely?
Any ideas welcome... dont try telling me i have a virus or spyware just in case any of you "one answer fits all problems" idiots are about.

Thanks to all that replied,here was the problem.
By bios was seeing the drive as a 300gb drive,it was only when you tried to :
(i) partition with fdisk
(ii) use win xp disk management tool

Here was the solution:
To enable 48-bit LBA large-disk support in the registry:
1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Atapi\Parameters
3. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following
registry value:
Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0x1
4. Quit Registry Editor.
Sorted!!!
Thanks again everyone.

Answer 1

your problem is called "The ATA Interface Limit (128 GiB / 137 GB) Barrier". you can resolve that problem with downloading and executing a software tool available on the homepage of the hard disk manufacturer. for example for the Maxtor hard disks the tool is called MaxBlast4 (it can break open this 137GB barrier of the OS).

Answer 2

first off, make sure it really is a 300GB hard drive as advertised. Secondly, whenever a hard drive is formatted, it automatically loses 7% capacity due to the format for the installation of the Operating System. Also, if you have a Western Digital or Seagate hard drive, you wil have less than advertised space. WD and seagate both got away with using a different unit of measurement for a GB of space. Their measurement is 1,000,000,000 Bytes instead of the 1,073,741,824 bytes everyone else goes by. check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte to see what I mean.

As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers' definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (however, computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a capacity of 1,000,000,000 bytes would have a reported capacity of only 0.93 GB.

Also, the version of windows XP you have may make a big difference. If you have Windows XP SP1, then that's the reason why. You should download the SP2, which is free from http://www.microsoft.com The last thing I can think of is maybe when you got your computer, the manufacturer incorrectly or even deliberately had a smaller partition space for your drive. A partition is a portion of a hard drive kind like setting up zones on a drive. Each one of these partiotions will represent one drive within the drive. If it was as big as could be there is no way you will even get near the size you thought it would be.

Answer 3

136GB is a BIOS limitation of 32 bit addressing. Update your BIOS, then reformat your drive. Are you using XP? XP usually sees through the BIOS limitation and can see the full drive, but you know how windows goes...
Get the flash utility and BIOS update from the manufacturer of your board, or if it is an OEM go to the manufacturer for a bios update.
If you've never flashed a BIOS before, get someone that knows what they're doing so you don't create a big expensive paperweight.

Answer 4

there could be 3 solutions

1 format the drive to ntfs that should fix it and would be the easiest one but if that fails

2. click start /run type fdisk and create 3 100GB partitions and format then to whatever you want.

3 use a program like partition magic (get the free trial from www.download.com) and that's similar to fdisk but with a GUI (graphical user interface) so maybe easier to do if you don't like dos

Answer 5

This is caused by a virus. Just kidding your BIOS does not support over 136gb which can be easily updated. So obviously this is a little bit older computer. In the manual about your hard drive it will should show where you can get the update.

Answer 6

I ever see this problem.
The problem is in your RAID Drive or in your OS driver.

The problem I ever meet and solve's :
200gb SATA readed only as 130gb when I'm installing usnging Win XP SP1. But when I'm installing using Win XP SP2 everthing goes fine.

Try to download the latest RAID / SATA Driver for your motherboard and try to reinstallit again.

Hope this will helps. TQ

Answer 7

Could be very simple.
Try taking the jumper off the back.
It may be limiting the drive to 150gbs!

Answer 8

1st what name brand drive do you have. You can go to their site and download the software to format and get it ready to use and read the entire disk...I have had the problem before and every hdd manufacturer has their own software to install their HDDs....thanks