250 gigs won't show up

I've got a hitachi T7K250 pata hard drive that is supposed to have 250 gigs but from windows only has 31.somethings. Originally, yes, the jumpers were set to limit the drive to 32 gigs, but even after I changed the jumpers the full capacity didn't show. I'm sure I have the jumpers right because when viewed from the bios the drive registers as 250 gigs. It's only from windows device manager or explorer that the drive shows up as 31 gigs. Do I need to reinstall windows? or *gasp* format??

 

If you partitioned and formatted the drive with the jumpers set for the 32gb limit then you will have to repartition and reformat with the drive set to recognize the full amount...........

 

did you format it with fat32? if so fat32 only supports up to 32gigs and you need to reformat to ntfs

 

okay... thanks... now i'll just reformat... :cry

but yes, majorgeeks is cool :major

 

This is truly nonsense.

It is slightly more complicated than just reformatting. You must either delete the existing partition and create a new one using the full disk or (tricky) use the command line utility diskpart plus the extend command to extend the partition to the full disk this only works on NTFS, did you say yours was currently FAT?

Alternatively there are commercial (partition magic) shareware (acronis etc) and free resizers.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Resizer_d4701.html

 

sorry fellas, I already reformatted and reinstalled with my xp disc and the 250 showed up nicely. To be more specific, I deleted the old partition, created and formatted a new one, and installed my OS (using NTFS of course, I never did use FAT).