WD sata drive wrong size

Building New computer from new parts.
ASUS M4A785-M Athalon Quad Core. CPU
Maxtor 500GB sata

Bios sees HD as 500 GB
Windows XP install only saw and formated 129 Gb or so.
wasnt paying attention and didnt notice. disk management shows as fully partitioned.
I stuck another identical HD into the box and disk management sees it as same smaller size. Box is running fine in the smaller partiiton but I would like the other 2/3 disk space



MB / bios? probably not becasue correctly ID in setup screen but I dont know , OS ? Operator?

I was going to build Identical and put Windows 7 on it . I may do that and see if it is OS. but is XP limited on SATA size?

Thanks

 

I pulled the Caviar blue 500 with the XP small partion and put in Identical HD unformatted and installed Windows 7. formatted correct size and worked fine. so do I need a driver to use the XP?

thanks
Dc

 

My guess is that the Windows XP disc you have is from before Service Pack 1. If you created yourself a new Windows disc and slipstreamed SP3 (or at least SP1) into it, 48-bit LBA would be enabled, thus allowing you to see hard drives larger than 137Gb.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

 

Wyatt Earp is exaclty right. grabbed old disk.
Used SP2 and all was good. Thanks again. ( removed old disk from my domain )