Half of HDD not visible

[brandon dub]

I bought a 160 GB Western Digital (WD) HDD (1600JB caviar 7200) last year and formatted it with WD tools 11 which layed down a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). I removed the DDO and was left with only 137 GB.

I recently bought a WD 200 GB (2000JB caviar) which I'm now using as my primary OS disc and works great on its own.

So the 200 GB disc reads fine however the 160 GB disc is only read as 81 GB under windows (and Ghost, partition magic etc) after I reformatted it, unless, I use the DDO again.

Gigabyte sent me a link to flash my BIOS WITH the driver version my motherboard was shipped with (GA-81TXE) as their solution.
The AI support-bots at Western Digital email support say I should use WD tools11 to format the drive. Geez...Does any company actually offer any real help these days?

Why all the flip flopping from 160 GB -137 GB - 81 GB? Under partition magic I see no 'hidden' partitions, and I can't figure out why I only get 80 GB's? Even 137 would seem reasonable. What bothers me the most is the 160 GB drive cost more than the 200 (one year does a lot to $value$)

Things I've tried
1. Everything but Fdisk
2. (see number one)

 

[Rik]

Look at this https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic36678.html it may help.

 

[LNCPapa]

Did you happen to use Partition Magic to force a greater than 32g FAT32 partition on that 160 gig? I've seen funky things like this happen when you do stuff like that. If so try converting it to NTFS if that's an option.

 

[brandon dub]

The only instance of FAT in my house is my MP3 players and my cat, otherwise I'm all NTFS. The FAT system seems useless on a 48 bit LBA disc unless you have one small partition with Windows 2k or below.

Thanks for the link Rik. I didn't see anything there I could use though.My motherboard reads my OS disc of 200 GB so the BIOS shouldn't need flashing, no room for a controller card and I'm trying to avoid the DDO.

I think the disc is just incompatible with my system.
A hardware fart? I'll try to have it formatted on another computer and see what happens.
Thanks for your replies... :|