Haven't had much time with a compy in the last 1 1/2 years, and it seems I've lost my touch. Just built my new computer and all has gone well except it only gave me about 125Gigs of my 250Gig HDD.. :(
It's fine for now cause I'm using Win 2000 at the moment (all I had layin around) and I plan on installing XP when I get around to getting it.
1) check your BIOs is reporting the correct size for your harddrive (and not mis-configured to give a smaller drive size).
2) Check you haven't created 2x partitions on the harddrive by mistake.
3) Check that your M/B & O/S supports 48-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) as this will stop windows seeing anything more than 137Gb (about 120-125Gb after formatting). If you are unsure then check the support article here.
You can check the last option by going into Disk Management, and if it shows the remaining portion of your HD as "unalocated", then you need to extend the partition to include this unalocated space.
As far as I am aware XP will not let you extend your system partition, but other utilities like Partition Magic will.
My bios sees the full 250 and I'm quite sure I only made the one partition. Like I said it's not a big deal at this point, I just want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen after I install XP or Vista. Speaking of Vista last I heard it was crap. Is this still true today?
I think it's just windows being stupid.It's pretty old. lol I've got my E8400 overclocked to 4GHZ and it just doesn't feel a fast as it should.
OK, I quickly checked, for windows 2000 it wants me to edit the registry.. that's a pain in the ass though so I'm not going to. I'm 95% sure it's the 48-bit LBA thing though. So when I install a newer O/S this shouldn't be an issue.
yeah you shouldnt have LBA issues with XP SP1 or later. The fix was introduced in SP1 so as long as the version you install includes this, there will be no issues.
