Hard Drive Problems

Question

I reforamtted my 300 gb harddrive on another computer and put it back into the one I want to install Windows XP on. When I go to the formatting section of the installation on XP, I only get that it is 32 gb instead of the 300 gb. It worked fine on my machine before and I had no problems with it, but now the bios want it to be 32 for some reason, I dont know. SHould I install XP on it anyway and use the 'big Drive enabler' program on my computer or should I use the intel application accelerator thing? Will I have to reinstall XP onto it after I install it? The hard drive is a Maxtor 6B300R0 and thank you for your help.

mombodog · Answer

Just delete the partition and create a new partition and format, it should be the correct size afterwards.  You must format large drives NTFS using XP. You can format large drives FAT32 but you need a special 3rd party utility to do it in windows. Sounds like you formatted the drive FAT32, the drive size limitation for fat 32 is 32gb. Let me know how it works out..

bbctv27 · Answer

I tried what you told me to do and I got the WIndows XP CD to recognize it as 132 gb, but not 300. Whenever I use the Maxblast 4 CD to partition it, I put it on as 300 gb and then it tells me to erase it after I already set it up, but there are no other options. I want to know what is going on with it.

mombodog · Answer

You may need a XP with SP2 cd to format to full capacity. Or hang the drive on another XP machine with at least SP1, preferably SP2 installed and format it there. I had this problem on a PC last year but it was on a controller card, so I had a IDE to usb adapter and formatted the drive on a machine with XPSP2 to solve the problem. I later discovered my problem was not related to the controller card, It was a limitation of my bios, and the manufactured did not have a bios version to adress this problem (motherboard too old). You can try to flash the bios to the latest version. If not the only workaround is described above.

bbctv27 · Answer

I installed XP onto the harddrive, but it still says 132 gb.  I think it is a problem with my bios or something like that.  Using the harddrive, I updated the bios through the internet, but i still doesn't fix the problem.  Now I am installing SP2 on the hard drive to see if that will clean it up, I hope so.  I might upsate the drivers for the harddrive or try using maxtor again for it, but we'll see.  Thanks.

bbctv27 · Answer

I got the bios in my computer to now see it as 300 gb, so I thought I solved the problem, not so.  I go to run the windows xp installer and it sees it as 132 gb again.  It might be a problem with the CD, but I am not sure.  i'd love to hear what you have to say about it.  Thank you. I think I have to reformat it on another computer like you said again and I'll try that.   Worse thing is, I have to use the 300 gb as a secondary drive.

mombodog · Answer

It can also be a limitation of your bios. Older bios's do not support drives larger than 132gb, even when you boot from a cd or floppy. If this is your problem you can get a PCI/IDE card that supports larger drives. As a matter of fact when larger drives first started to be sold they came with these cards free. You can flash your bios to the latest version to see if this solves your problem.

Here is the card I have used in the past to solve these bios problems

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102007

Windows General

Hard Drive Problems

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