XP and large drives

[Mr. Poopypants]

Not sure if this has been asked ( I did a search but could not find) so I will ask. I just installed a 160 GB drive but XP refuses to recognise anything over
137 GB. I installed SP1 and followed the manufacturers directions but still no go. What can I do to fix this.
Any help or direction would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

[Ferral_Imp]

dunno if it still holds true now for windowsXp but when I put together my own external hd, the instruction manual that came with the hd said that you'd need a pc card thingie if the drive was over a certain size. sorry I can't help more but I dunno where I put the hd manual at. 🙁

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

It might be a motherboard /bios related problem as far as I know XP has not problems with large drives ( ntfs ) file systems.

 

[Hipster Doofus]

See how you over at Microsoft. Might get it going.

 

[Mr. Poopypants]

I have already checked out the micresoft knowledge base and applied there fix. The problem is I think when I originally formatted the HD and only allocated/formatted ~137gb cause thats all that showed up. Any way I can reformat the remaining drive without losing everything?

 

[falconguard]

try partition magic and do a non destructive partition, you'll get 135 gig and a 60 gig drive that you can then image without losing data. Did it with mine and I now have an 80 gig c: 94gig f: and 94 gig g:...yeah sure I'll change the names later but this is what I did

 

[Xie]

w/ partition magic you should be able to format the rest of the drive and then merge them i think if you wanted to have it all one drive letter.

 

[Admiral Michael]

Well with Partition Magic you could just resize the partition to include the left over space.

 

[Xie]

Well with Partition Magic you could just resize the partition to include the left over space.

yeah what he said, cuz he said it better then me 😛

 

[Mr. Poopypants]

Thanks guys
Was hoping there was a cheaper (free) fix, as partion magic is about $70.00us, which seems like a lot of money for a program I am going to use once or twice.
Oh well, guess I gotta do what I gotta do.
Thanks again

 

[canadian_divx]

weather you format it in FAT 32 or NTFS you will not get the true size of the hrd drive, like a 120gb hdd is a 111gb hdd, that is just how it is

 

[Ferral_Imp]

technically you are getting the whole entire drive when you format it. The reason why there is a difference between how large the box says the drive is and how large the computer says the drive is, is because the drive manufacturers and the comp use different definitions of a gigabyte. The drive has the exact same amount of bytes.

 

[ToronadoXP]

You should have about 150 - 155 gig drive with gig conversion lost. The hd companies advertise 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. But it really isnt.

 

[Mr. Poopypants]

Finally got entire drive recognised (partition magic).
It shows 152GB = 163,913,573,888 bytes.
Now im concerned about the noise it makes, is it normal for a drive to fairly noisy when it is in use. Kinda sounds like gravel in it.

 

[dubstar]

should sound like a phone on vibrate mode when its at its loudest.

 

[Mr. Poopypants]

should sound like a phone on vibrate mode when its at its loudest.

This is normal?

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

WHAT !!! if that is a new drive then NO you should not here loud noises I have 3 hard drives in this machine and 3 in my other machine and I dont here noises the only hard drives I here are the very old smaller drives that I work with some make a low pitched whine or a slight grinding very low but If that is like I said new then I would think about RMA'ing that right away