Dodgy HDD or SATA problem

G'day All,

This is my first try using a SATA HDD, so I don't know where the problem lies.

The system is brand new Gigabyte GA-945gcm-s2l with Core 2 2.3 cpu and 2 G ram.

The offending HD is a WD 250G SATAII which I purchased from another supplier.

When started, the bios report a 250G drive but when I tried to install XP Home, it only reported the drive size as 131G, so I dragged out the old W98 boot disk and FDisk reports 41G.

I have tried to install an IDE HDD and everthing is reporting correctly.

I know this is not normal, but am at a loss as to where the problem is.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

Problem solved....turns out that the XP home was so old, it did not have sata controllers. Got hold of a new copy and everything is working fine.

 

Yup... I was going to say that if you're installing WinXP and it's not service pack 2, it will only read drives up to 131gb, even if the drive is 250gb. But you figured it out on your own
:celebrate