hard drive question

[kiran201]

I have a Samsung 7200 160GB IDE hard drive, and when I go through my computer to see the size of the drive the drive size shows up as 115 GB. I know that part of the drive is used up for system files and reserved for other things but 45GB. That seems like a bit much. If there is a problem, I hope that it's easily fixable.

[saint]

Has the drive been previously partitioned and reformated? If a partition has been deleted it will be seen as unallocated space and you will need to get something like Partition magic so you can merge it back into the :C drive.

[Euphoria]

If using Windows XP, it doesnt detect larger drives that around the 112GB mark unless service pack 1 is installed and even then once the partition is made you will have whatever space is left over as a seperate partition - a bit annoying!

If you want it all as one drive though, your going to need to already have the drive formatted for it's full capacity and then install Windows on it.

[kiran201]

If you want it all as one drive though, your going to need to already have the drive formatted for it's full capacity and then install Windows on it.

So if I have not formatted the hard drive yet. I should uninstall windows, and format the hard drive for its full capacity. Then reinstall windows? If this is true, thanks for the help. I really appreciate it. :)

[Euphoria]

Sorry that wasn't very clear what I put before. I had a 160GB Maxtor hard drive and has the same problem as you. What I did was install XP on another hard drive that was smaller than 160GB and used that for my main drive. I installed SP1 on there and then formatted my Maxtor drive to it's full capacity. If you don't had a spare hard drive you can use for your boot drive then you could format it in another computer and then put it back in yours, or make 2 partitions say of equal size. At least then you will get the full capacity.

Hope this is clearer!

[kiran201]

If you don't had a spare hard drive you can use for your boot drive then you could format it in another computer and then put it back in yours, or make 2 partitions say of equal size. At least then you will get the full capacity.

Hope this is clearer!

I don't have an extra drive to use, so I must use the latter method that you stated. Does this other computer have to have XP as its OS and SP1 installed? I guess that I am still confused on whether or not SP1 needs to be installed onto the 160 GB hard drive or not. Thanks for the help.

[Euphoria]

Basically Windows XP cannot detect largers hard drive sizes unless SP1 is installed. It doesn't need to be on the 160GB hard drive though, just as long as it has been formatted to it's full capacity it will be fine.

I think the 2nd option is the only thing you can really do as you only have the one drive. It does have it's advantages too, I partitioned my drive for 40GB for Windows and programs then 80GB for games to be installed on and the left over I used for downloads... up to you though!

You could format it on a different machine, but make sure it can detect the hard drive size before you format it - Disk Management will tell you that.

[kiran201]

You could format it on a different machine, but make sure it can detect the hard drive size before you format it - Disk Management will tell you that.


How do I go about formatting the drive, if the other computer runs windows XP home?


Thanks for the help

[Euphoria]

Plug the hard drive into the computer, make sure the jumper setting are set correctly on the hard drive. Go into Windows, right click on My Computer - Disk Management - find the hard drive and away you go!

[The Pimp]

XP CAN and DOES detect larger drives without SP1 installed during information, it is down to how the BIOS itself allows the Operating System to read the drives. For Windows to read the drives from a standard BIOS, it will need to support a 48bit LBA mode. How do I know it is a BIOS limitation? Easy, as I have successfully installed a non SP1 OEM XP CD on a 200Gb Maxtor drive using the HPT RAID controller instead of the onboard IDE controller (Abit AT7 MAX). The HPT controller supports a 48bit LBA natively where as the BIOS on the motherboard didn't but still detected the full size of the drive.

[Euphoria]

Hmm... well I had trouble getting XP to recognise my 160gb drive. I asked on these forums what was up - only relaying the help and advice I was given, but when SP1 was installed it was fully recognised.