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Help! Windows recognizes a 250GB HD as a 127GB

T

tphss

Senior member
Hi,

I have 2 internal Hard Drives in my Core Duo system, one WD 74GB Raptor and one WD 250GB, both SATA of course.

Windows XP is installed on the Raptor and the other HD is for storage and all the rest (to seperate windows from all other programs running).

When I wanted to format the 250GB HD (throught windows) I saw windows is formating it to 127GB (NTFS). I got this HD used (the 250GB) and it has some windows files on it if it matters.

How is it possible? What can I do to format it to the correct size?

Please help me I'm putting all my installations in a halt.

Thanks
 
Looks like the seller ripped you off and sold you a 127gig drive, we get that a lot here...

No seriously just install sp2 and do the format again.
 
What Motherboard or make of computer is it ? ? In some cases, you may need the very latest BIOS
to make windows see the full hard drive size. Try going into the BIOS and make sure that the specs
input for the drive for #of heads, tracks, cluster size, match what is stamped on the drive label.

It can also be a limitation of an older motherboard / chipset. If that is the case, your easiest way
out is to install a pci ide card which can access the full size.
 
I never did that in the BIOS, checking all that.
I have the lastest BIOS version from ECS, motherboard is ECS P965T-A, you can see the specs of the computer in my sig.

thanks
 
Where do I check which version of that I have? But I'm pretty sure I have this version if it's the lastest since I only built this computer 2 weeks ago and I downloaded all the new patches/drivers/updates.

Anyone knows how come in the picture I added it showed on one window the correct size and on the other one the 127GB size?
 
What I can tell from your pictures, is windows see a 127GB partition and some unallocated space. Delete the existing partition and create a new one that takes up the whole drive.
 
Originally posted by: Baloo
What I can tell from your pictures, is windows see a 127GB partition and some unallocated space. Delete the existing partition and create a new one that takes up the whole drive.
Click to expand...

yeah, this is most likely the problem. right click my computer, click manage, go down to storage and disk management and you should see all the space. you can format the unallocated space from here
 
Originally posted by: toughwimp11
Originally posted by: Baloo
What I can tell from your pictures, is windows see a 127GB partition and some unallocated space. Delete the existing partition and create a new one that takes up the whole drive.
Click to expand...

yeah, this is most likely the problem. right click my computer, click manage, go down to storage and disk management and you should see all the space. you can format the unallocated space from here
Click to expand...

THANKS! really helped I did it through Manage and it's fine now.
 
You can do it thru Disk Management ... But why ? ?
FAT 32 is limited to about 32GB in size, limited in file name size.
NTFS overcomes all those limitations and is very stable. And it
has been well received by the users since it was introduced.

Unless you have small files that absolutely must be in FAT 32
for use say on an old WIN95 or WIN98 computer it is not worth the trouble
 
Originally posted by: bruceb
You can do it thru Disk Management ... But why ? ?
FAT 32 is limited to about 32GB in size, limited in file name size.
NTFS overcomes all those limitations and is very stable. And it
has been well received by the users since it was introduced.

Unless you have small files that absolutely must be in FAT 32
for use say on an old WIN95 or WIN98 computer it is not worth the trouble
Click to expand...

Thanks you basically answered all I wanted to know. So who still uses FAT/FAT32 formatted hard drives?

 
Originally posted by: tphss
Originally posted by: bruceb
You can do it thru Disk Management ... But why ? ?
FAT 32 is limited to about 32GB in size, limited in file name size.
NTFS overcomes all those limitations and is very stable. And it
has been well received by the users since it was introduced.

Unless you have small files that absolutely must be in FAT 32
for use say on an old WIN95 or WIN98 computer it is not worth the trouble
Click to expand...

Thanks you basically answered all I wanted to know. So who still uses FAT/FAT32 formatted hard drives?
Click to expand...

I use fat 32, simply because when it breaks, it is much easier to fix than NTFS, and it is faster.
Fat32 is not limited to 32GB, all file systems are limited in file name size - fat32's limit is much bigger than anyone should ever need. NTFS is more secure, less likely to break, and that it thing only real advantage it has. I prefer performance, so I go with fat 32.
 
I stand corrected on some facts about FAT32 .. You can have up to a 8 Terabyte max disk size,
but the sector sizes are very limited. Also, if you want to format as FAT32 when you install XP
then it only be 32GB in size. You need to format the rest after the os is installed.

See link for more detailed info from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463
 
For modern hard drives, NTFS just makes since. FAT32 was great in it's day, but once grew beyond about 20GB, it really started loosing out to NTFS. Anyone else remember trying to break a hard drive down into a ton of small (less than 2.1GB) partitions to keep the sector size from being HUGE? You could easily lose 30% or more of your hard disk capacity due to "slop" in the sectors. Especially if you had a lot of small files.

If you are still using Windows 98 on an old, small hard disk, go with FAT32. If you are using Win2k, WinXP or Vista on a modern (less than five years old or so!) hard disk, go with NTFS and be done with it.

Oh, and if speed is your only criteria on the file system, then you should probably stick with Windows 98. Everyone knows that Win2k and above have a LOT more overhead than Win98 did. But running a modern OS on an antique file system because of a few % increase in read speed is a bit silly.

And no, none of this rant applies to the USB keys and other small memory items. But eventually, they will get large enough that you will need to make the same decision on file system that we had to make on hard disks a long time ago.
 
the file size is limited to ~4gb in FAT32 so if you are planning to work with larger files ex. DVD images, then you need NTFS.
 
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