SATA Drive Size

[Kardon]

I have a 250GB SATA drive.

Windows Disk Manager lists it as 186.30GB, and Windows Explorer lists it as 127.99GB. I know that is because I didn't install SP2 when I installed Windows the first time. But, I have installed it since then, but I am still unable to see the rest of the drive in Disk Management.

Is my drive 128 or 186GB? Also, how would I access the rest of my drive? Thanks

 

[Gravity]

I'd try partition magic. That program will give you a view of what's remaining on your drive (lots) and help you decide to add it to the existing partition or to have it put in it's own partition.

 

[BadThad]

You've hit the 137GB limitation well known in the "geek"community.

There are 28 bits used for the sector number interface with the operating system, BIOS and the hard disk. This means a hard disk can have a maximum of 2^28 or 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes, placing the ATA interface maximum at 128 GiB or approximately 137.4 GB.

You should have partitioned your drive during the OS install. The difference you see is due to hard drive mfg's defining a GB at 1000MB, when in fact, it's 1024MB.

 

[BadThad]

Good reading HERE.

 

[Kardon]

I know it's a limitation, and I knew I could access the rest of the driver after SP2 install
Partition Magic doesn't see the extra drive space at all.

Seperate issue, the drive really is 128GB? or really is 186?