i had a raid 0 striping configuration that i didn't want. i removed it by disabling the raid option in the bios facility. I went to reboot and it came to load and said a disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del to restart. i inserted my win xp pro 32bit cd. restarted and started to do the windows setup.
now my two harddrives are SATA 1 and they are both 160Gb Hitachi deskstars. it came to the sorting out of the drives and partitions but both hdds appear as 131gb harddrives instead of 164gb which it says in the bios.

why does it only show up as 130gb?
will i have to update my bios now that i have formated and all that? never had to deal with raid or sata before so am kinda noob with this...

edit: the setup was copyiing files after the format and reboot and it said there was an error, cyclic redundancy or something. so i have started to install xp home edition because that is what i got with the computer. do i have to install third party scsi or raid drivers even if i don't use raid config? and also should i install a driver for amd processors because i have never had an amd before either... thanks

You need the third party drivers for SATA. 130MB is a well-known hard disk size limitation - the drivers should help you around that.

MB is a typo--he means 130gb

so now that i have installed windows and all that how do i install the drivers? do i have to start again?

Maybe you should consult someone more experienced with computers if you don't know how to install drivers Usually you have to run some program like "setup.exe"..

Mind you, your partitions will still be 130MB in size even after Windows realises that the disks underneath are bigger.

very funny, so i guess you can't help me then.. oh well :blackeye: :stickout:

so my suspicions are correct, i will need to format and install the drivers at the beginning of the windows installation...

You could use a program like Partition Magic to resize your partitions. Or just create new ones in the unused space.