A Slight Hard drive problem

[Corwin613]

I am trying to get my main computer back up and running and i installeda 250 gig seagate into it and installed XP Pro and for some reason I am only showing 132 gigs..

Now when it setup and formatted the drive it only showed 132 gigs as well and I didn't think nothing of it at the time previously I had a 120 gig and I didn't have this problem.

I am sort of thinking that it might be a BIOS setting but I am not exactly sure

Any help would be appreciated

Motherboard is a MSI KT4 Ultra (MS-6590)

 

[SNGX1275]

It is likely because your copy of XP is its initial release, pre SP. I would slipstream SP2 into it first, then install Windows. This is probably not what you want to do at this point though, so 2 other possible solutions would be:

* Download and make (or use the disk that came with the drive if you have one) and have it partition and format the drive before you ever boot from Windows.
* Create a partition on the drive for XP (like 15-25 gigs depending on how much you install to your C partition rather than another partition or drive), and leave the rest unformatted. Once Windows is running, upgrade to SP3 and then partition/format the rest of the drive through Disk Management.

That is a fairly old board, but I don't think you have a 137GB 'barrier' on the HD. There is a chance I'm wrong though (esp if you are trying something like XPSP2), if that is the case then you will want to update your BIOS which I found here.

 

[Corwin613]

I have already updated to SP3 but I haven't a clue about the disk management, where would i find that? It is not under system tools and I am pretty sure I have never used it before but then I have never had this problem before except with very very old computers running like 98

 

[SNGX1275]

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disk Management

Did you update after installing from a pre SP disk? Updating doesn't automatically make your drive larger, it just adds the ability to format to the larger size.

 

[Corwin613]

I figured it out now i just need/want to be able to merge the 2 partitions into one

I installed from an XP disk I am not sure if it was pre SP but it did also have an SP2 install disk with it after I installed both of those I updated Windows to SP3

 

[SNGX1275]

Well, like I said initially, I would just create a slipstreamed install disk and start from there. But I realize that most people wouldn't want to go through that after already getting the OS installed.

Without a program like Partition Magic you won't be able to merge them. What you can do is get gParted and delete your second partition, and then 'grow' your OS partition to fill the rest of the drive.

Screwing around with partitions is always a bit risky, which is why I'd just make a slipstreamed SP2 disk (I think making slipstreamed SP3 may have some issues...) and start from scratch. Then you never have to worry about this coming up in the future.

 

[Corwin613]

Well thank you I can manage from here now

still have so much work to do though 4 more computers still sitting here to be worked on and this one is being a pain by rebooting on me heh i know the reason for the reboots but not the why... oh well