Should be somewhat easy question...

Just upgraded my processor/motherboard. Have a Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 motherboard, AMD 3700+ processor, and Maxtor 300GB hard drive.

The bios for this motherboard has a weird function where the sata hard drive can function as an IDE hard drive so you don't have to load any 3rd party drivers when installing windows xp, however when I load winxp seems like the LBA mode is not enabled because Winxp only recognizes 137GB. Any advice for me on how to get winxp to use the full 300GB?

Tomorrow I'm gonna try and find the sata drivers to load as 3rd party drivers for my hard drive. But any info you all may have is greatly appreciated. Thank you

 

In order to see the full capacity of the drive when installing Windows, you'll need SP2. You will need to make a copy of your Windows disc and slipstream SP2 into it. I think this is the tutorial I used to create mine:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm

 

Most motherboards have native SATA support now, eliminating the need for SATA drivers on windows install. Have you verified that Windows setup cannot recognize the drive with the BIOS option turned off or whatever?

I think the option your mistaking is SATA RAID or standard SATA IDE, since IDE mode is still SATA. (both Parallel and Serial ATA drives are still IDE)

and for what its worth, I've had no issues installing XP SP1 on 300GB drives and recognizing all 300GB before SP2.

 

winxp worked fine with this hard drive before. Only thing that has since changed is I replaced my motherboard/processor. with OLD motherboard/processor I am able to install SAME winxp PRO and see the full 300GB.

In BIOS it sees 300GB

However when going through the winxp install (Boot from CD) when going to choose/make partitions it locks me out at 137GB. Any other ideas?

Yes it has that mode. What mode should I hvae it in? Right now it is in IDE mode.

 

Your should leave it in IDE mode. Most likely you arent using one of the SATA RAID ports anyway.

I would get MaxBlast (Maxtor's hard drive tool) and boot to that CD, which will allow you to Partition and Format the drive how you like, before installing windows. Then during windows installation, you should see the full 300GB, and save lots of time since it will already be formatted and you can leave it intact to continue with setup.

you can get the MaxBlast 4 ISO file here. burn it to a cd and boot to it.
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...oftware Downloads/Top Downloads&downloadID=19

 

Will MaxBlast allow me to remove a partition without reformatting the entire drive?

 

are you concerned about data loss there?

short answer, yes. Though it depends on where the partition is, and also if you leave a partition in tact and create another one, the MBR is still the old one, so the new partition would be partition 3 (assuming you had 2 partitions before, and wanted to nuke the first and create a new one)