Help please! Drive not showing true space.

Traducer · 7 Apr 2007 at 13:20

Just built up a new computer and seem to be having some problems with the hard drive settings.
I've not used SATA before and this time around all my devices are SATA.
My Western Digital 250GB Drive is only showing up as 127GB total memory, now that can't be normal.
My motherboard is a DS3 Rev 3.3.
Is there something in the BIOS I am missing? any help would be great, thanks.

mctiny · 7 Apr 2007 at 14:14

Traducer said:
Just built up a new computer and seem to be having some problems with the hard drive settings.
I've not used SATA before and this time around all my devices are SATA.
My Western Digital 250GB Drive is only showing up as 127GB total memory, now that can't be normal.
My motherboard is a DS3 Rev 3.3.
Is there something in the BIOS I am missing? any help would be great, thanks.

If there is nothing in the BIOS and you have windows XP then get sp1 or 2 on it

.

WozNot · 7 Apr 2007 at 15:20

Yeah, I concur with mctiny. There's also a post from Rilot titled General Hard drive FAQ's in the forum sticky The Hard drive forum FAQ/Sticky, please read -Updated 11/2005-

Q: My XXX drive only shows as 127 GB in Windows.
A: You need to have Windows XP SP1 installed in order for windows to be able to see the space over the 127 GB limit.
This is due to limitations of the 32bit addressing used by Windows prior to SP1, SP1 includes an update that allows windows to use 48bit addressing for hard drives.
You will also need hardware that supports 48bit addressing, i believe most/all new motherboards do (if you have an older motherboard which does not, you can probably get an IDE expansion card with support for 48bit addressing fairly cheaply).

skanky · 7 Apr 2007 at 15:35

also, there should be no reason not to have sp1/2 on a xp machine

WozNot · 7 Apr 2007 at 16:05

Absolutely!

It's quite handy to have SP2 slipstreamed, it makes life a bit easier when doing a re-install...

rpstewart · 7 Apr 2007 at 16:24

Traducer said:
My Western Digital 250GB Drive is only showing up as 127GB total memory

Hard disk space! Hard disk space! Not memory! Memory is the stuff on the wee PCBs that attach to the motherboard.

Sorry, just a wee pet peeve. Anyway, as everyone has noted this is due to a lack of SP1 on the install CD. Once you've updated to SP2 you've basically got two options - either you go and acquire a copy of Partition Magic and use it to extend your existing C: drive into the free space on the drive or you use the built in Disk Management utility to create and format a second partition on the disk which will appear as a second drive letter in My Computer.

Traducer · 7 Apr 2007 at 20:19

I have SP2, always have.

rpstewart · 7 Apr 2007 at 20:20

Do you apply it after the install though? To be able to create a partition greater than 127Gb you need to have SP1 or SP2 integrated into the install CD.

Traducer · 7 Apr 2007 at 21:03

Good point the version of XP I have does not have either of those built into it.
That may explain a few problems I have been getting.

IAmATeaf · 8 Apr 2007 at 13:39

Traducer said:
Good point the version of XP I have does not have either of those built into it.
That may explain a few problems I have been getting.

That would explain the max 127Gb, you could either do a re-install with SP2 slipstreamed to get all the available space, or open up Disk Management and create a second partition of the remaining space or use something like Partition Magic 8 and above to extend the partition space into the blank area ie grow the partition to fill the disk space available.