I have spent hours trawling the internet to solve this problem.

I have a 80gb Western Digital hard drive which I have converted into an external usb2. When started windows xp back up it recognised the drive straight away but when I came to format the drive it would only let me format up to 31.2gb.
I have tried formatting it via Fat32 and NTFS but still get the same size.
My pc is only a month old.

If anyone can tell me what i'm not doing right I would be appreciated.

I know this topic has been covered before but they never seem to be able to give the right information otherwise I wouldn't be posted this.

Please Help....

Welcome to TechSpot

On the back of that Harddisk is a jumper, that limits its formatted capacity to 32GB. Look at the jumper-settings and remove that jumper. Problem solved.

Thanks for the replies, I have taken the jumper out from the hard drive and deleted the drive and started again but it still comes up with only 31.4gb of space. It is currently NTFS, when I right click on the drive icon and select format, under the heading capacitiy whether its FAT32 or NTFS its capacity is 31.4gb.

Anymore clues ?

Is there any limiter in the conversion hardware?
Did you remove the correct jumper?
Otherwise, follow Rick's advise and format with Partition Magic.

If all else fails, format that HD while attached to your IDE-cable, than put it back in its USB-case.

Ok I tried deleting the partition which was successful but in disk management it shows something like unallocated 32gb. I bought partition magic 8 and tried that but I still have the problem of the size only being 32gb maximum.
I also tried formating the hd when attached to a seperate pc which worked but when I put it back in the external case it recognised the drive but I had to reformat it again which was a maximum of 32gb.

Anymore clues ?

You would think microsoft would have done something about this problem..

Can you give us the exact model and type of that Western Digital HD, as well as tell us where ALL the jumpers (if any) are?
There must be a case of mistaken identification of the HD-jumper pins (upside down?)

How did you format it in that other PC? NTFS or FAT32?
Is that HD on a USB 1.1 or USB 2.0?
Are there any jumpers inside that USB case?

The exact model is wd80 with 8mb buffer, I removed the jumper which there is only 1.
I formatted the drive on the other pc under fat32 as I haven't got windows xp installed on that one.
The HD is on a USB 2.0 port and there isn't any jumpers in the external case.

The whole thing makes no sense, unless there is a faulty connection somewhere in your USB-case.
Have a look at WD-teststuff here: http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

if i were you, id install partition magic 8, that will show you all disk space, partitioned space, and unpartitioned space. if there is any unpartitioned space, you can use partition magic to merge it with the current space on the HDD