hard drive issues

[ispofdoom]

heres the deal:
I had a 160G SATA hdd connected. worked fine. installed 300 IDE hdd. worked fine. reformatted complete system. reinstalled windows. now it registers both hdd's as 127G... I've checked the BIOS to see if RAID could be interfering.... and it doesn't seem to be. I dont think it would be the pins at the back limiting the hdd size as it worked before I reformatted.

I am in the process of updating wondows (XP) and so it could possible be something to do with that -?

Rest of my rig:
DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 (cant remember complete model name)
the hdd's are both from reliable brands - one is seagate the other western digital, or both are one or the other.
Windows XP
1 gig ram. corsair value ram
Geforce 6800 vid card
AMD 3500+ socket 939

any help much appreciated. any more info required just lemme know. cheers

 

[JetBlack69]

You need Windows XP with Service Pack 1 to see the full capacity of the drives.

 

[secretanchitman]

Originally posted by: JetBlack69
You need Windows XP with Service Pack 1 to see the full capacity of the drives.

thought it was service pack 2...in any case, install SP2 regardless.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

48-bit LBA strikes again!

Here you go, read this.

 

[JetBlack69]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

SP1 is all you need, but I agree, you should install SP2.

 

[Jiggz]

The problem now is that you are forced to have more than one partition in each hdd. For the future, you might want to slip stream SP2 in your XP CD.

 

[gerwen]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
The problem now is that you are forced to have more than one partition in each hdd. For the future, you might want to slip stream SP2 in your XP CD.

Agreed, in fact, you may wish to do it now while your install is still fresh.

Download a program called Nlite, it will make the work much easier. With a bit of work you can create a new XP install CD that contains all the windows updates to current, as well as any extra drivers you may need, and a few applications thrown in if you so choose.

Then you can re-format and install windows as you would have originally wanted rather than the annoying partition sizes.