When installing Windows XP on my desktop my 200gb sata drive is only recognized as a 130 gb.
2007-06-29 14:52:05 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Add-ons
My BIOS is reading it as 203gbs. Now when I had XP installed it read it as 189gbs. I tried insatlling windows 2000 pro and got a message saying the the Maxtor drive had exceeded a certain amount limit. I then got a second message telling me in 2000 that it would have to be formatted as FAT32. After I installed 2000 it would not work with my computer. Then I switched back to XP and during installation I got the same amount 130gb for XP. What is weird to me is during XP and 2000 installation process I get the same amount of space. 130 gbs is recognized before I partition the Maxtor drive.
2007-06-29 15:06:17 · update #1
No the entire drive does not show up on the setup screen. It is weird. My BIOS recognizes the actual space of the hdd, but windows does not.
2007-06-29 15:20:33 · update #2
But windows is my Maxtor!!!! Ugggh. I have a corporate edition of XP with no service packs.
2007-06-29 15:23:44 · update #3
Hey thanks for the instructions people. I have found that XP has an unallocated amount of 61.93gbs.
2007-06-29 15:27:29 · update #4
One last thing do I want to make the unallocated space a primary extension or extended?
2007-06-29 15:28:41 · update #5
Well is your XP SP1 or newer.. the "original" XP would only recognize 130 gig.. this was at the time a "bug" which was fixed with SP1 . (Thats one possible item.)
There were many BIOS that just would not use larger drives but since you are running SATA that shouldn't be the issue.
1. Does the entire drive show up on the "Setup Screen"?
2. Once installed - do you show an "unpartitioned space"?
If 2.. you may want to use a partition manager like partition magic and just add the additional space to the existing partition etc.
There are also some other "hacks" that might help
http://techpatterns.com/forums/about260.html
is one of them.
Now that we know it is Maxtor.
HERE is MAXTORS help on this exact issue
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=127_GB_-_137_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=186b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
That should get you going. It is a known issue.
2000 would not and did not use drives that large! So you will want to reparition and reformat with XP!
2007-06-29 15:07:21 · answer #1 · answered by Tracy L 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Well, first off, your 200GB isn't really a 200GB hard drive.
For marketing purposes, they market a kb as if it is 1000 bytes, and a magebyte is 1000kb, and a gigabyte is 1000mb.
Actually, though, in the technical world, 1kb is 1024bytes. A megabyte is 1024kb, and a gigabyte is 1024mb.
Now, this may take some space away (as much as 8%) but nothing like the 25% you're experiencing...
Is it partitioned? Are there already some things installed on it? Maybe it's really a 160GB harddrive?
2007-06-29 21:56:46 · answer #2 · answered by spudmunkey 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I read somewhere maybe when I was formating a new drive that there is something specific you need to do in order for windows to see that the drive is bigger than what it showing. I can't remember what it was. I do know that the information is on the formatting disk that came with the drive and that it does have something to do with partitions, ntfs and windows xp. Read the information that came with the drive.
2007-06-29 22:01:33 · answer #3 · answered by rdfdjd 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It could also be due to partitions (sections of storage space). It could have 2 partitions and windows only sees the bigger one.
Hope this helped.
2007-06-29 22:01:38 · answer #4 · answered by Julio 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋