Hard Drive question

Hello to all.

My WD Raptor HD is 150 Gig but after windows installation the drive only shows 127 Gig. What's the deal?

Just wondering,
aKa

 

See this:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showpost.php?p=818167&postcount=3

 

Puzzling yes since the 150Gb drive should format down to about 139Gb. Your motherboard bios is definitely 48bit LBA enabled and so should have no trouble detecting the 150Gb WG drive. Have you gone into the bios to make sure that the bios has correctly detected it?

XP SP2 certainly would have no issues with correctly detecting that size of drive. I have a 250Gb Seagate with XP SP1 and the o/s detects it no problems. Have you gone to Disk Management in XP to check.

Is this drive an addition or substitution. If substitution what was their before....

Did you try clearing the cmos prior to upgrade. Not that I think that is likely to be the issue.

 

I checked disk management and in the blue, striped section it says 127.99 GB
but to the left of it "Disk 0" it says 139.73 GB

Still confused

aKa

p.s. thanks for the reply

 

So in Disk Management on the left where it says Disk 0, you have 139.73Gb which is correct.

Immediately to the right in the section with a dark blue top it says 127.99Gb. Does that partition (with the dark blue on top) go right across the whole disk ie from extreme left to extreme right, or is there a section with black on top and which in the box says 'unallocated'.

Good luck

 

Actually, there IS a section with black on top and which in the box says 'unallocated'. Y?

aKa

 

Ok and that 'unallocated' section is at the end ie furthestmost to the right...

What is the size of the 'unallocated' section. Is it 139.73-127.99 ie 11.74Gb?

If the above is correct, then XP has correctly recognised the 150G HD as 139.73Gb.

What appears to have happened is that you have created and formated a partition equal to 127.99Gb but have left a part of the hard disk 'unformated' ie 'unallocated' and this space is 11.74Gb

Not sure what happened but there are 3rd party programs which can change the partitions on HDs. I personally use Partition Magic. I am not sure if XP will allow you to expand the current partition to take up the 11.74Gb but I think not.

All the best

 

This 'unallocated' space is 11.74Gb. I'm not sure what happened during installation. All I know is I installed windows using SP1 only cd and added SP2 from a cd I got from MS.

In the past I installed windows xp with SP2 embedded cd and windows always recognized my HD as 139+ Gb.

Could this be the cause?

Regards

 

Therein probably lies the cause of the issue. SP1 is in theory sufficient to allow XP to detect the full size of the o/s but sometimes to my understanding there are issues.

The issue as I understand it lies with the version of the Atapi.sys file. I ran across this info a while back which may be of interest to you.

As I said by no means an expert here but it would have been interesting to find out what Disk Management had shown in terms of the total size of the drive ie where Disk 0 prior to installing SP2.

Anyhow, the way to use the 'Unallocated' space is to get a disk utility prog such as Partition Magic and expand your current C:\. Unless of course some other user has an alternative method which can be done via XP.

Apart form the MS links the following link is of interest.

http://www.48bitlba.com/

FYG, I have SP1 and in Disk Management my Disk 0 shows as 232.30Gb formated for a 250Gb HDD, ie it is correct. Strictly speaking I have SP1a and perhaps the Atapi.sys file in that release is different to the one found in SP1. Personally, I use Partition Magic to create partitions and don't use anything larger than 100Gb and have not had any issues. I guess maybe that is primarily due to the fact that I don't let XP get involved in creating partitions or formating my HDDs.

Good Luck

 

Well, the issue solved.

I reinstalled windows with SP2 embedded cd and all is well.

Thanks for all the replies,
aKa