savak Posted June 6, 2007 Report Share Posted June 6, 2007 Hi allI have just had a drive die on me, no power.I bought a new 250GB Hitachi IDE drive from PCWorld but when I try to install XP it only identifies the drive as a 131gb drive. The BIOS recognises the drive as what it is. No matter what I try I cannot get XP to see the full drive capacity even when fully installed.What am I doing wrong?Advice greatly appreciated as I've a major job to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Posted June 6, 2007 Report Share Posted June 6, 2007 I believe they provide a configuration/setup CD with their retail products. Presumably yours was OEM ?What O/S are you using ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mt_uk99 Posted June 6, 2007 Report Share Posted June 6, 2007 Hi allI have just had a drive die on me, no power.I bought a new 250GB Hitachi IDE drive from PCWorld but when I try to install XP it only identifies the drive as a 131gb drive. The BIOS recognises the drive as what it is. No matter what I try I cannot get XP to see the full drive capacity even when fully installed.What am I doing wrong?Advice greatly appreciated as I've a major job to do.Try this link. Seems XP may only recognise 130GB but there may be a fix. It can recognise all of a drive previously formatted to over 130GB but will not format it to it's full capacity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted June 6, 2007 Report Share Posted June 6, 2007 I formatted a 300 gig harddrive and it recognised I think 199 gig, you could do what I did and partition it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
savak Posted June 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 Hi allI have just had a drive die on me, no power.I bought a new 250GB Hitachi IDE drive from PCWorld but when I try to install XP it only identifies the drive as a 131gb drive. The BIOS recognises the drive as what it is. No matter what I try I cannot get XP to see the full drive capacity even when fully installed.What am I doing wrong?Advice greatly appreciated as I've a major job to do.Try this link. Seems XP may only recognise 130GB but there may be a fix. It can recognise all of a drive previously formatted to over 130GB but will not format it to it's full capacity.The "Try this linK" doesnt link!No CD was supplied in the box.When I piggy backed the drive on another system I was able to create and format two partitions.Took it back to the system it's meant to be in, tried installing XP PRO and got the same problem.Still stuck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Posted June 7, 2007 Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 Whats the make/model of the motherboard of the machine you're trying to put it in ?Is it old and there is a size limit in the current BIOS ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
savak Posted June 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 Whats the make/model of the motherboard of the machine you're tryiing to put it in ?Is it old and there is a size limit in the current BIOS ?Please read the original post or to save you the bother:It is NEWIt is an HITACHI 250 GBBios RECOGNISES IT as 250 GB capacityWINDOWS XP PRO is the problem in not seeing all 250GB only 130GB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ithonicfury Posted June 7, 2007 Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 What version of XP Pro are you trying to install (ie. what level of service pack does it have built in)?I believe in order for XP to see over 132gb drives, it has to have at least Service Pack 1.Try using a CD with SP2 built in already, or use nlite ( www.nliteos.com ) to create one and see if it will recognize the extra space. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nellie2 Posted June 7, 2007 Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 I don't know if any of the tools here will help, from what you have said... windows should be able to see the drive okhttp://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htmPerhaps you could fire off an email to hitachi, they may be able to throw some light on the subject Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan2273 Posted June 7, 2007 Report Share Posted June 7, 2007 I have recently installed a 320GB Hitachi drive and had no problems with it being recognised.XP Home SP2 and Linux Mint both recognised it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb Posted June 8, 2007 Report Share Posted June 8, 2007 When I piggy backed the drive on another system I was able to create and format two partitions.Took it back to the system it's meant to be in, tried installing XP PRO and got the same problem.I don't understand what the problem is now - does Windows "see" only one partition? Now with the partitioning, the problem seems to be quite different than the original one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Posted June 8, 2007 Report Share Posted June 8, 2007 Whats the make/model of the motherboard of the machine you're trying to put it in ?Is it old and there is a size limit in the current BIOS ?Please read the original post or to save you the bother:It is NEWIt is an HITACHI 250 GBBios RECOGNISES IT as 250 GB capacityWINDOWS XP PRO is the problem in not seeing all 250GB only 130GBMy question to you was about the motherboard - not the drive :)This would appear to be a problem with 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support for ATAPI disk drives which increases the capacity of your hard disk to more than the one-time 137 gigabyte (GB) limit ? If you are using SP2 it should cure this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
savak Posted June 8, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 8, 2007 Update timeOK the motherboard is a Gigabyte, sorry can't remember model number off hand, running a AMD 3200+ processor with 1.5 gb ram, updated with the latest bios because I heard that large drives need 48bit LBA support. I dont know if my motherboard supports 48 bit or not so this might be the root of the problem.The Bios recognises the 250 gb, also at Windows partition creation stage 232 gb is the maximum allowed, but it reports 131 gb on disc x etc. I managed to copy an hdd I have from work with XP and SP2 and this works fine under Fat32, when I try to format the remainder of the NFTS partition windows seem to give a write delay error of some sort.So what do you think? I do fancy Core2Duo processor with new motherboard as that should resolve all problems!I was just being a bit sarcastic earlier as I'm a bit cheesed off with this situation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
savak Posted June 25, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 25, 2007 OK I got this sorted. The next thing I want to know is what software recommendations is there for resizing HDD's with out data loss? Preferably free!Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted June 25, 2007 Report Share Posted June 25, 2007 Not free but Partition Magic is probably the best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Posted June 25, 2007 Report Share Posted June 25, 2007 This is free :- Ranish Partition Manager is a boot manager and hard disk partitioning tool. It gives users high level of control for running multiple operating systems, such as Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, and Windows 98/2k/XP on a single disk. It could create, format, copy, move, and resize up to 32 primary and extended partitions. It has command line interface similar to gdisk and a simulation mode that works with the large files instead of messing with the real disks.http://www.ranish.com/part/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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