Computer Help needed

[strapping young lad]

my cousin gave me his tiny pc to fix cos of two reasons

his first hd is goosed and wondered if i can recover data from it (work in progress)

second is that he bought a 200gb hard disk and windows says its only 130gb

no problem says i

some investigation found that the mobo MAY not recognise large hard disks and the bios needs doing, but since info on the web regarding what the mobo manufacturer says against what it says on the screen, using the wrong bios update would kill it.

anyway to cut the long story short, i bought him a new mobo today plus case and some ram.

plug in the hard drive..

xp install says.. ITS 130gb AGAIN! /Grrr

the only similarities between the tiny box and the one i built him today is that i transplanted his p4 chip and his pci cards over (sound/usb) and his agp card.

anyone have any ideas why windows can only see 130gb out of the 200gb?

oh and when i go into bios it tells me its 200gb!!!!!

bloody hell

[You See]

Perhaps it's been partitioned 130GB/70GB and the 70GB hasn't been formatted?

[bradc]

I'd have to go along with Uc about the partitioning. Is this at the first XP install screen with the blue background where you see 130gb?

Delete the partition, and hopefully it will come up as something around 190gb, if it doesn't, make sure all the partitions are deleted, and restart the computer, hopefully it will come back up as 190gb.

[strapping young lad]

sorry should have been more detailed..

after installing xp, when you go to the disk management part, it shows a 100gb and a 30gb (not another 100gb as it should)

not tried partition magic yet as my copy is in work.

[_simon_]

When you installed XP it would have asked where you want to install to and on that screen it would have showed you if there was unpartioned space.

Back in the good old days when BIOS had 38GB limits drives above that used to come with jumpers that would make them look like a smaller driver. Don't know if they still do.
I also remember something about needed a service pack to get above the 130GB limit but maybe thats win2000. Still I'd install at least SP1 of XP

Have a look in the disk management section of computer manager that will tell you what the OS thinks is there (control panel->Administrative tools->Computer Management)

[strapping young lad]

funnily enough

once id installed sp2 i have now got 200gb!

bloody xp/pan

[KiwiTT]

There is a registry patch utility on this page, that you can use for Windows 2K SP3 or XP Sp1 here http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html

[strapping young lad]

is this restrictive to certain brands of hard drive or does xp sp1 only handle a 130-odd gig of hd?