Helping out a co-worker

[TangoJuliet]

So a fellow co-worker asked me to do some work on his old sony computer. Apparantly he went to best buy last year and had them replace his 80gb hdd with a 500gb one. He then told me that BBY ripped him off because all he saw was around 120gb of storage.

I told him that there was a 137gb barrier in the earlier versions of XP and that when he upgraded to SP2 that shouldn't be a problem. He also said that the guys at BBY wouldn't connect his old drive for some reason. I had figured that there probably wasn't any more room inside the computer.

However, I took the thing home tonight - ripped it open and lo and behold all of the connections were right there to add the old 80gb drive as a secondary device. I saw that his primary drive was split into 2 partitions around 100gb and 20gb out of 500gb total.

I am currently upgrading to SP2 then to SP3 but after I do should that 137gb limitation be gone? Or will I have to do something else? I also wanted to get rid of that 2nd partition and just make it a full 500gb parition. Do I need to get some software (partition magic) to do that or can it be done within windows?

 

[KLin]

http://forums.anandtech.com/ca...atid=34&flcache=376715

 

[KLin]

And congrats on becoming the new tech support bitch for your co-worker.

 

[aceO07]

Using Windows you can delete the old partitions and create a new one.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Originally posted by: aceO07
Using Windows you can delete the old partitions and create a new one.

yeah but the primary partition is the boot partition - by deleting the 2nd parition will I be able to merge that along with the rest of the drive space to the primary?

 

[TangoJuliet]

Originally posted by: KLin
And congrats on becoming the new tech support bitch for your co-worker.

Its cool. The guy gave me $40 last week to format an old computer and put Win 98 SE back onto it. Took me about 5 minutes to do and another 40 mins for the install (300mhz athlon, thanks!). The extra money is nice because I need some new shoes!

 

[Shawn]

Why would you upgrade to SP2 then SP3? Can't you go straight to SP3?

 

[BigJ]

The BIOS must also support 48 Bit LBA. XP SP1 and later all had support for 48 Bit LBA.

 

[Train]

If said coworker is not of the opposite sex and you are not receiving oral compensation, then you fail.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Originally posted by: Shawn
Why would you upgrade to SP2 then SP3? Can't you go straight to SP3?

There wasn't an option for that under windows update - just said update to SP2.

 

[AkumaX]

run diskmgmt.msc and see if there really is a limitation (or they partitioned it weird)

 

[TangoJuliet]

Ok, so I just updated it to SP2 and it showed something like 300 gb of un-allocated space. I deleted the 2nd parition (d drive), formatted the space and now I have two partitions - one that is 15GB and the other is 450GB. The 15gb partition is the drive with windows on it. Is there any way that I can combine it all to one parition?

 

[Fox5]

You may need to expand the partition to fill the rest of the drive.

 

[vshah]

i don't think XP's disk management utility can extend a partition, you'll have to use a 3rd party tool. try the linux live cd "gparted"

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

[thomsbrain]

Originally posted by: Shawn
Why would you upgrade to SP2 then SP3? Can't you go straight to SP3?

SP3 does not include SP2. You have to do both.

 

[Eli]

Originally posted by: TangoJuliet

Originally posted by: KLin
And congrats on becoming the new tech support bitch for your co-worker.

Its cool. The guy gave me $40 last week to format an old computer and put Win 98 SE back onto it. Took me about 5 minutes to do and another 40 mins for the install (300mhz athlon, thanks!). The extra money is nice because I need some new shoes!

A 300MHz Athlon, eh?

lol

 

[xcript]

Originally posted by: thomsbrain

Originally posted by: Shawn
Why would you upgrade to SP2 then SP3? Can't you go straight to SP3?

SP3 does not include SP2. You have to do both.

It's recommended to install SP2 first, but not required.

http://technet.microsoft.com/e...indows/cc164204.aspx#1

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: vshah
i don't think XP's disk management utility can extend a partition, you'll have to use a 3rd party tool. try the linux live cd "gparted"

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

The CLI tool (diskpart?) isn't documented to dynamically extend an NTFS boot filesystem, but I've used it successfully that way before. In other words, you can merge the active C: volume with adjacent, contiguous unallocated space.

 

[Shawn]

Originally posted by: Eli

Originally posted by: TangoJuliet

Originally posted by: KLin
And congrats on becoming the new tech support bitch for your co-worker.

Its cool. The guy gave me $40 last week to format an old computer and put Win 98 SE back onto it. Took me about 5 minutes to do and another 40 mins for the install (300mhz athlon, thanks!). The extra money is nice because I need some new shoes!

A 300MHz Athlon, eh?

lol

I'm pretty sure there is no such thing. Maybe he means a K6-2 300MHz.