Installing XP troubles

[Emohawk]

Hi all,
I've just brought a new Western Digital WD3200SB 320GB Caviar Raid Edition hard drive as my old 120gb drive was starting to fail. I want to use this for my main drive and partition it into 60GB and two 120GB (total of 300GB). I've done this fine but for some bizarre reason when I try to install XP from my CD it only shows the drive to be 131567 odd Megabytes - WTF?
I've googled this over and over again and I can't see that there is a maximum drive size to install XP onto - when I boot into my current version of XP it reads the drive fine it's just when your on that blue screen bit at the beginning of the xP install (the bit it asks you to choose a drive, format etc). I've removed all other drives so I only have cd and HD going but nothing seems to make any difference. I'm running on a fairly old MB - Asus A7N8X deluxe but I don't think that should be a problem (tried the drive on both primary and secondary IDE slots).

Any ideas? I wanted to have XP installed for the weekend when I can sort all my files out etc. I'm just really confused now...
Thanks

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

It may be that the BIOS cant handle the size of the drive, I have a machine that wont see an 80gb drive in the BIOS yet 2K sees the drive with no problems, look for any BIOS updates on the Mobo website, or consider buying a newer board.

Regards

 

[Emohawk]

Apparently (according to a work collegue) only XP service pack 2 can see large drive. He advises me to partition the drive as normal under my current install of XP SP2 - then install as normal on the drive (even if it does only show 131000Mb) - after installing SP2 on the new install I should see the drive correctly...
Can anyone confirm this? ta

 

[N3051M]

Apparently (according to a work collegue) only XP service pack 2 can see large drive. He advises me to partition the drive as normal under my current install of XP SP2 - then install as normal on the drive (even if it does only show 131000Mb) - after installing SP2 on the new install I should see the drive correctly...
Can anyone confirm this? ta

Correct. SP2 has support for drives larger than 127Gb

 

[Emohawk]

excellent - i'm just obtaining a copy of xp with sp2 included for install tonight - thanks for the help...