XP and Hard Drive Size

joroma · 18 Apr 2006 at 10:02

I've got an early version of XP Pro that has not got SP2 built into it (I have got the SP2 update CD from Microsoft).

I am fitting a new 160gb SATA hard drive (not in RAID). My BIOS sees it as a 160gb drive but when I install XP it sees it as 127gb (or thereabouts). My plan was to do the install including SP2 then in Admin Tools/Disk Management get Windows to see the drive as one 160gb drive. I have done this but cannot do the last bit as I can't see how to get Disk Manager to combine the two portions of the drive ( one 127gb approx and one 21gb approx ) into one seamless hard drive. I understand XP takes up some of the HD so I won't get the full 160gb but would like to end up with one C: drive making use of all the avilable space on my new drive. If I can't do it with XP is there a free utility programme that will do it for me??

joroma · 18 Apr 2006 at 11:47

"Your other option is to slipstream SP2 onto a new CD and reinstall onto the whole disk".

Sounds good. How do I do this?

joroma · 18 Apr 2006 at 12:42

Thanks. I'll give it a go tonight.

joroma · 18 Apr 2006 at 12:44

Just had a look at the nLite site. Do I need to download the net.framework files or are they already on XP Pro?

joroma · 19 Apr 2006 at 08:16

Was up until 0130hrs trying to slipstream but keep getting stuck at burning the image. The instructions refer to NERO Burning ROM, which I have, but I cannot get to the advanced burning options described where you go into advanced settings select No Emulation, Change the number of loaded sectors to 4 etc.I have made 10 CDs that didn't work so far!! Any ideas?

joroma · 19 Apr 2006 at 08:48

I've got NERO ver 6.?? but I don't get the New Compilation Tab shown in the guide (which is the one I tried to use).

joroma · 20 Apr 2006 at 08:19

Bingo!
Used nlite to slipstream my XP installation CD and SP2 even added the Product ID and language / keyboard settings etc and it worked a dream. What a brilliant programme.