ASUS mobo and Hard-drive problem.

[birchy65]

Hi there,
My first post here so excuse me if I seem stupid! (Most likely)
My brother-in-law has a PC built by Evesham Micro in the UK and it had an 80Gb hard drive installed as new. This has just failed (although the PC is now out of guarantee) and I had previously installed a secondary drive for him (250Gb) so the plan was to remove the 80Gb drive and just have the one 250Gb drive at least for the time being. All went well until I came to re-install windows XP (via the Evesham Recovery CD) and I noticed that on the partition format section it only recognised approx 130Gb of space. I checked the Bios and it hadn't recognised the drive correctly so I checked for newer Bios version and found version 1011 (original being 1006). I have flashed the Bios today and again that seems ok, it now recognises 250Gb BUT the windows installer still wants to format 130Gb only.
So my question is, has anyone come across this before?

The board is an ASUS A7V-266E (rev 1.07) and the drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 250Gb U133

Any help very much appreciated, I don't have much hair left anyway and can't really afford to pull any more out!!!

Ian.

 

[Liquidlen]

Most likely the version of XP on the Manufacturer's restore disk is pre SerPack 1 is needed to natively see that big HDD. Check the info here and you can work around to get upgraded
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013/en-us

 

[birchy65]

Thanks for that, I've also been directed towards Maxtor (the manufacturer of the hard-drive) and a program they provide called MaxBlast which I'm led to believe will sort the problem too. I will give that a go and then take a look at the microsoft stuff I just printed out. Actually you have got me thinking, I remember in the days of 98se upgrade from 98 you could boot the upgrade disc and put in the original when asked, I bet that wouldn't work for service packs too.....we have an original sp2 cd. Mmmmm just a thought. Thanks for the reply - I'll let you know how it goes!

 

[mailpup]

Service pack CDs are not the same as upgrade CDs, so you're right. It won't work.