Installing XP on 200gb Drive

ok, first of all i thought this would be everywhere, but after some time looking around i gave up and just decided to ask... I just got a new computer, but i decided to install my own version of XP Pro instead of the one they had provided (home edition)

but when i formated the 200 gig hard drive it only shows 32gb. So i attached it to another machine and partitioned the drive to a 127gb and a 71gb, but the new machine still only shows it as 32gb... here's my question...

If i install the XP pro on the 32gb, then install the service pack, will i be able to expand the hard drive so i can use the full 200 gb? do i need software to do it? remmber i'm using this drive as the boot drive.

any help would be greatly appriciated.

tap

 

wacky huh, well how did you reformat your drive? By Fdisk? Or some third-party software?

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

If you want the OS to be a full 200gb drive you'll need a program like Partition magic to extend the partition. Or you can have multiple partitions, the 32gb can be you OS partition and then the remaining can be storage.

 

I don't understand why you're limited to 32 GB. Supposedly, some HDD have a 32 GB jumper for compatability with older BIOSes, but that doesn't explain why the other machine works fine.

BIOS limitations are generally 528 MB (504 MiB) for BIOSes older than 1994, 8.4 GB (7.8 GiB) for BIOSes older than 1998, and 137 GB (128 GiB) for BIOSes older than 2002.

Windows 95 has a hard limit of 32 GB... but this is XP.

Are you formatting with FAT32 or NTFS? If a drive is formatted with FAT32 and uses 16KiB cluster sizes, there is a hard limit of 32GiB. You must go to 32 KiB sectors to extend the HDD capacity to 2 TiB, but you should never use FAT32 on drives this size.

Please give us the make/model of your mobo and HDD.

 

Thanks for all the replies guys, I reformated my hard drive using the hard drive's manufactures disk managment software, in this case it was seagate. I know my bios and mother board are able to recognize my hard drive becuase it was used on it before. At first the hard drive read 137gb, but crashed during installation, and now it reads at 32gb. Which i thought was super weird. my 32gb jump was not on. but as long as i can expand the hard drive later i don't care. I will try to install it on the 32gb and then try to expand it with partition magic (Acronis Partition Expert it's free to try)... hopefully it won't effect my ability to boot up. initially, do you think i would have had better luck partitioning with Fdisk rather then the Seagate software?

tap

 

I'd run the HDD tests on the drive. Something is wrong, and I don't think it's WinXP.

At the very least, swap the IDE cable for a different one (make sure it has 80 conductors). Also be sure the IDE cable is at the end of the ribbon (the middle one is slave, and you get better signal quality at the end). If your HDD is sharing a channel with a CD drive, put it on another channel.

 

Win XP should give you the option to format and partition the drive. XP will take the full 200 under NTFS.

At least that was my experience installing on a new 250gb maxtor.