Hi, just bought a new Weston digital 250GB HDD, went to format the drive but would only let me partition the drive with 130GB.

My first thought was the BIOS, but when looking in the BIOS and setting the primary master to user type hdd, it shows the correct size but windows will not let me partition the full amount of 250GB.

I have a asus A7v-880 motherboard and trying to install Windows XP home, does anyone have any ideas why am losing over 100GB of space.

Carl

Here you go:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B303013

Thanks for the link, but still could not get it working.

think i may invest in partition magic, and have 2 or 3 partition on the HDD

You don't need partition magic, format the partition to the maximum size, install windows and required updates, then use windows control panel administrative tools and disk management to set up the rest.

Originally posted by Carl_5
think i may invest in partition magic, and have 2 or 3 partition on the HDD

That still won't work - we tried this to get around the problem a few months ago.

I think it was a 160Gb drive and we set it to have two 60Gb partitions and a 40Gb, but the final 40 wouldn't show at all.

Would now be a good time to say "Install Linux instead":hihi:

The trouble is Windows won't recognise more than that size. Unless...


You can install a copy of Windows with SP2.

That is not install a copy of Windows then download SP2. THIS WILL NOT WORK

The windows cd needs to have SP2 incl.

Originally posted by Skatiechik
You can install a copy of Windows with SP2.

That is not install a copy of Windows then download SP2. THIS WILL NOT WORK

The windows cd needs to have SP2 incl.

this means buying a new OS which is not what a wanted to do has XP Pro is about £100 online.

I just thought it may be possible to setup different partitions e.g have a 40gig space for windows and setup files, then have two 100gig partitions for games and docs/ media stuff.

'Never had known that there was a limit of 137gig in Windows Xp untill this week'

You can combine an old copy of XP with Service Pack 1 or 2 using slipstreaming, it's not too difficult, instructions here (http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm). When you install afterwards, it'll already be SP2'd, & should be good with larger partitions

Is this a SATA Drive and are you using an IDE cable? I don't know if you can get SATA Drives with IDE connections cos it's a waste of time but I thought I'd ask.

Either way if so, you need to plug the Drive in to one of the SATA connections that should be on your motherboard.

cheers for the above, but managed to get disk management to create a new partition.

which is a little helpful cause i can use one partition for all my media stuff and the other for rest of my stuff

Originally posted by limpetboy
Either way if so, you need to plug the Drive in to one of the SATA connections that should be on your motherboard.

We think he's probably managed that already.

I remember the good-old bad days of Windows NT4.

You were limited to a maximum of 4Gb for your boot partition, unless you tinkered with your registry or third-party boot loaders, at the risk of making your system unbootable.

Of course, that was probably more trouble than it was worth - disaster recovery never was NT4s strong point.

NT4 would happily run, until it blew up. And when it did blow up, that really was an ELE :D