Hard drive partition / format / install problem?

Question

help ! ive just recently bought a new hard drive and its a 300g however when i put it in my pc it is only being read
as containing 31g.this is obviously a partition. my question is how do i format it or set it up so i can access all of it ?
windows xp install cd is only recognising 31g .also wen i put it in my other pc as an F drive i also am getting the
same capacity reading.. this must! b a partition please help i want the whole drive !! how do i do this? is there a hard format?
if so how do i do it?. ive just recently found that the jumper lead was limiting it so when i change it I'm now gettin 130g . an improvement yes but not all i want i want the lot ! this is brand new samsung HDD with no data on it. its replacing an old 80g western digital. if i take off all the jumpers will i get the whole drive?

its going to b the main drive for an old pc.. its currently an f drive in my new pc.. i am usin xp with sp2

Answer 1

I recently had the same problem with a 250gig .Mine was partitioned too as i have been told so are many large capacity drives .. goto Start .. Control Panel .. Administrative Tools.. Computer Management ..Look for Storage + Disk Managment ... what does it say there ?? +Can i ask if you are using xp service pack 2 ? ...Is it also main drive or backup ? . i'll get back to you

p.s you need the jumper to determine how your computer will read the drive as ..

Answer 2

What your dealing with is the 137 gb limitation on motherboards with bios. If your computer is of the pentium 2 era or younger, as well as some pentium 3 computers (or amd's of similar age) the motherboards didnt use 48bit addressing so the computer is physically unable to read beyond a certain limit. You can solve this issue in several ways. 1) Find the motherboard manufacturer and see if there is a bios update that addresses this issue. Flashing the bios incorrectly is dangerous and can leave you with a paperweight. 2) Use a USB case to access the drive over USB. This is going to be rather slow as you probably only have USB1.1. USB2.0 is probably faster then using it internally... 3) Purchase a hard drive controller as it will read the hard drive instead of the computer. Make sure to get a good one. 4) Use the disc tools that came with hard drive as they could be used sometimes to bypass the bios with a secondary system

Answer 3

Removing the Jumpers wont give you the whole drive. Your Hard drive likely has an install CD, read it. You can format the drive with either your XP disk or the Samsung CD may have software to format it. Did you partition the hard drive? If you did unpartion (delete the partitions)

Answer 4

You can remove any partitions when installing windows xp, so you shouldnt have a problems.

Ensure you have all the service packs with your Windows Disk, if you dont have any in does clip the hardrive capacity, because of the bit encoding, but not to 31GB, so I would bet your right with the partitioning.

Answer 5

You need to use 3rd party software like Partition Magic or Disk Director. I prefer Acronis Disk Director Suite and recommend it to you. It is a user-friendly program that allows you to resize, move, copy, split, and merge partitions without losing any data. In addition Disk Director has a number of useful features. You can learn more about Disk Director Here: http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/diskdirectorsuite

Answer 6

The BIOS in your computer may be seeing it as 31Gb but when you install the OS and boot from it the Windows OS should see it as 300Gb.

You may also need a utility disk which should be supplied with the Disk. I have a Maxstor disk that needed this to be installed first and it works great.

Answer 7

You can use Fdisk, which is an old dos program that will create and delete partitions. As for the jumpers dont mess with them. just set it to secondary if its not your main hard drive or caple select if you have that type of atapi cable.

Answer 8

Go to www.samsung.com - Support - FAQ's -Computer related products - hard disk drive - troubleshooting - popular questions - question no 4. Hope this helps.

p.s have just found this site which will help
www.48bitlba.com/

Answer 9

IGNORE THE F-DISK ANSWER - IF URE USING WINDOWS XP - U WANT TO BE USING A NTFS FILE SYSTEM

ALSO YOUR MOTHER BOARD MAY BE LIMITING THE DISK SIZE