137G limit help

[verbalkint99]

Well I decided to get rid of the old 80gig HD and go with a new 250gig SATA drive. I guess I didnt pay close enough attention when I ordered it from New Egg and got an OEM drive, meaning no set up discs. I installed Window XP Pro and used that disc to format the drive. It was not till after everything was installed that I noticed the OS only sees 137 of my 250gigs. I looked online and the only fixes I can find are for SP1. Is there anything I can do with out starting fresh and having to install everything again? Whats the best way to get this fixed?

Thanks!!!

[SgtM]

How old is your motherboard? Maybe you need a bios update.

[.Maleficus.]

XP sees all of my partitions... (C:\ NTFS, J:\ Linux LVM) 230GB formatted.

Update your BIOS, install SP2 if you haven't, and if you don't get anything else, make another partition.

[crenn]

This problem is to do with LBA. It may not be possible for your controller to handle HDDs large than 137GB.

[verbalkint99]

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813130119

Thats the board I have now. I just hooked the new drive up as a slave and repartitioned it and formatted it, gonna try to reinstall windows in the morn

thanks for the help so far!

[HackSore]

If it shows up as being 137gb when you boot into windows try this:

go to control panel>administrative tools>computer Management>Disk Management.
It will show you all the disks you have installed in the machine, and whatever partitions you have made. hopefully you should see a box with a large amount of unformatted space, then all you need to do is right click on it and click format.

If the missing space isnt showing up, then you need to get sp1 or more preferably 2.

Its not an ideal way to do it, as you end up with a 137gb partition and then however much space is left on the other, so if you want more control over the size of your partitions and whatnot when installing windows, you need the machine to recognise the full amount of space whilst installing.
to do that follow .Maleficus.' advice and get copy of windows streamlined with sp2 or try updating your bios.