Getting over 137gb

[CorsePerVita]

Man do I feel stupid. So I haven't built a new system in years. So "SATA" hard drives, all these new connections, PCI-Express... it's all new to me. Call me a dinosaur.

Anyway...

My hard drive has been dying and finally took a dump last night. I bought a 320gb hard drive, reformatted windows reluctantly and got it going.

I noticed my computer only sees 127gb at startup.. "Hmmm that's weird." only to find out that windows limits what it sees in the initial process to 137gb. I did not know this.

After googling my brains out I figured out you need to do the following:

1. Ensure your motherboard supports 48-bit LBA
2. Update your xp to service pack 1 or better (I went onto download.com and downloaded service pack 3 at 500kb/sec rather than waiting for microsoft's site at 50kb/sec ha!)
3. Do all necessary updates...
4. Probably best to install the maxtor big drive enabler: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Maxtors_Bi...ler_d4998.html
5. Once you do this, restart windows then go to start>run type in compmgmt.msc and hit enter, go to disk management and you'll see a large portion of your main drive that says it isn't accounted for... right click on it, go to "new partition" and format it as a second hard drive

Solved!

I'm sure some of you already knew how to do this but i hate asking people stuff and prefer to figure crap out on my own. Yay for google and solutions for people who are going "HUH!?" at the 137gb limit who didn't know like me.

[Enigma]

Well im for sure did not no that so thanks for tutorial mate, can come in handy some day !!!
+rep 4 u

[XcOM]

or if your motherboard already supports 48bit lba and install windows that has SP1,2 or 3 from setup will see and use the whole drive.

Strange thing is when i use windows 98 i would use fdisk, it would see my 250gb drive and partition it to 12gb, format would see 52gb, and when windows was running i could see all 250gb!!

WIERD

[ilambat]

okayive got the same problem but when i right click the drive no option or partion comes. and when i format the drive it says format failed.