hard drive capacity vs BIOS

Gateway 3040GZ laptop
XP SP3
Phoenix BIOS W320.F07

installed a new Western Digital 250GB EIDE drive. only 127.9 GB is recognized by XP. i have tried every partition method available to XP including a clean install of the OS, as well as ubuntu, gparted and others to gain access to the remaining space. I have tried manufacturer tools from WD, Hitachi and most tools on Hirens boot CD.
the only thing i know of left is a BIOS upgrade. Gateway does not have a BIOS upgrade available. i have looked everywhere for one. biosagentplus says it has one, but i don't trust it, especially for $30 upfront. i have read too many reviews of that product to consider it except as a last resort.

im to the point where i need the space on the internal drive and am at a loss as to how to get there.
thoughts, ideas, flames, sandpaper?

thanks in advance

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
You can hook up the drive to a different PC... either put it in an enclosure (under $25 at any PC store) or use a IDE>USB adapter cable (under $15 online; can be hard to find at PC stores; here's one at Newegg). Plug it in to a PC running XP, then divide it in to 2 equal partitions of approx 120gb each. Yeah, I know, it's not ideal, but it works and gives you full use of the drive. Or you can leave it in the enclosure as a back-up drive and use the original for the OS....

Happy Holidaze! :drink

 

thanks for the response, dlb, but no joy. i have tried several different incarnations of that using a desktop machine. i broke the drive into 3 partitions and when i install it in the laptop i can't even get through a fresh XP install. it goes straight to BSOD. i'm all but convinced that this is a BIOS issue, i just can't seem to find a BIOS update anywhere i trust.
its almost pointless to put the 60GB drive back in and carry the 250GB around with me. there has to be a way to make this work.

 

I wish you the best of luck. There's not much more I can do for you as it seems you've tried everything I would normally suggest. Be careful with BIOS updates that aren't downloaded from the manufacturer's web site. Many of these 3rd party BIOSes are modified by end users (people like me and you) and what worked for them may not work for you, and there's really no way of knowing until you flash the BIOS, which generally is not reversable if the :crap hits the fan.

Good luck, and Happy New Year!