250gig WD only recognized as 120gig

[foozy]

So i'm building a system with a Biostar GeForce 6100 AM2, Athlon 64 3500+, and WD 250gig SATAII HDD. The system boots fine, I load windows fine, the only problem is that the hard drive is half as big as it should be. Something is only seeing a 120gig hard drive instead of a 250gig. I was thinking perhaps BIOS needs to be updated, but the board model is less than a year old. Thoughts?

 

[kitty500cat]

Maybe the manufacturer decided that 1GB=500MB; not much worse than the existing 1GB=1000MB

Is the drive partitioned for some reason? I'm no expert on hard drives though.
cheers

 

[foozy]

No, it's a brand new drive. I stuck in an identical 250gig WD hdd and I had exactly the same problem. I browsed around the forums a little more and found some junk about Windows not recognizing anything greater than 137 gigs. I *thought* that the BIOS was seeing it at 137gb also, but now i'm not totally positive.

 

[foozy]

Updated the BIOS, installed Service Pack 2, still the same problem.

 

[tipstir]

Didn't you run the CD that came with WD drive? Also there is a tool out there that does a low level format that will give you more than 250GB. Remember though a 250GB is just a little over 230 to 240GB.

The problem you're having I did the samething for this guy kids computer it only came up what you had. But you need to run the CD that came with the drive so it can unlock the size or something like that. If it still doesn't do it take the drive back to where you got it. How come you didn't get 320GB they're dirt cheap now. 298GB is the correct size.

 

[foozy]

Its an OEM drive, no CDs. I loaded Debian and the problem was gone - drive came up at 232gb, i'm assuming the rest is in the boot sector.

So apparantly it's a windows problem, but installing SP2 doesnt' fix it. Hmm.

 

[Tedster]

read the GUIDE's forum about BIG hard drives.