Large drive on older P3. Help please.?

Question

I can really use some help on this.

I have put to use an older computer, P3 450mhz, as a music server. It has the original 40 GB HD with window XP and 160 mhz of RAM.

I had a 250GB HD pre-loaded up with music for use in this older computer. I plugged it in to the secondary IDE channel, using the correct jumper on the drive and position on the ribbon cable, for use as the 2nd channel primary drive.

The computer saw the drive, and was able to access all the files on the drive. Problem was that a few files were corrupt or unreadable. So, I pulled the drive, installed it in my good P4 3.6GHZ machine and reloaded all the music.

Now I'm at the point where the P3 only sees some of the drive, wants to run scan disk, says folders are unaccesable, etc.

Properties says that there is 240GB of data on the drive but the P3 can only access a small portion of it. When I let the P3 run scandisk I can access most/all the music, but the file names are mixed up. I've reformatted too.

Help pleas

Answer 1

You should try reformatting it into multiple partitions! Put the hard drive in any computer that can see the whole partition and format it but do NOT create partitions. Next boot up Windows and open the "Computer Management" utility. In the tree along the left hand side, go into "Storage" and then "Disk Management". Find your disk in the list at the bottom and right click it, you should be able to create multiple partitions, try it out with two 125 partitions...if that doesn't work...go smaller!

Answer 2

It has to do with your windows version.

The older the windows version the smaller size hard disks it can detect.

For example, even winXP cannot see more than a 136GB drive without SP#1 or SP#2 installed.

So post your version of Windows and if you have any (SP) service packs installed.

If your windows is too old it will never see the whole 250GB.