Hi,

I have a 160GB HDD, which i recently formatted before installing windows from scratch.

When I plugged it back into the same machine, with windows running on a different drive.

Windows detects the drive as now only being 127GB.....

Before it showed in 'My Computer' has having 158GB...

Where has 21 GB gone, just because i formatted the drive ??

Please help, thanks

 

What file system did you format to? From within Windows, you should be able to access the drive, and reformat it. Reformat to NTFS, and make sure there are no partitions...

Other than that, some motherboards can only use a maximum of xxxgb on a slave drive, so this might be the prob? I dunno too much about that tho....

Give the reformat a try. Should just be able to right click that drive and select FORMAT from the drop menu....

 

NTFS file system, as with all of mine.

Will try re-format again, but i am baffled

 

Lastly, check the jumper pin settings. Some HDD's have a setting for capped disc size.... Unlikely, but worth a look I guess....

 

Checked that, no luck

 

What did you use to format the disk in the first place ?

 

Windows XP installer, booted from windows XP CD

DOS type formatter, when loading windows on to a HDD from scratch

 

What sort of HDD?

I purchased a Maxtor 160GB drive last year and had to use a special program to get the disc to show correctly

 

Download the maxtor tool off their website

 

Yea, that's it, the large hard drive tool. Worked well for me.

 

Windows XP will only see 130GB on a fresh install on a massive Drive.
You can't get the remainder of the drive to be visible untill you actually install windows fully then mount it.

 

Now i didnt know that, good bit of info to try and remember for future reference

 

I don't quite follow Mike - eleaborate a little for me please?

 

Say for instance you buy a 300GB hardrive. Like mine, when you plug it in, your Bios will see it as 300GB or most bios's should anyway.
When you go to Install XP from your CD, during setup the program will check the new drive, but will only see 130GB's of it, thats all Windows XP setup will see.

Once XP is completely installed and running, you can actually setup the rest of the drive, make sure Service pack 2 is in etc, You go into Computer management, then disk management and setup up the rest of the space on the new drive for windows to see it.

 

That's only on IDE drives, SATA drives have the whole disk recognised

 

Oh okay.... But, if you already have a PC running XP on a 60gb drive, and you go and buy a 300gb drive and plug it in as a secondary drive - will windows see the entire 300gb?

 

No, it apply's to SATA as well. Windows XP Setup only see's 130 GB maximum, If you hardrive maker does a Utility to load into setup then your lucky.


Thrush, yes it will work that way.