[Tjweikel24]

Just updated form a 40gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive. Only shows 127 avaible and is in NTFS, i want to use FAT32 but it wont let me reformat the hard drive. Thanks

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what service pack do you have on xp ?

how old is your motherboard ?

can you access your bios and see if it recognizes the correct size ?

Edited by hawklord, 16 September 2009 - 11:54 AM.

[hawklord]

what service pack do you have on xp ?

how old is your motherboard ?

can you access your bios and see if it recognizes the correct size ?

Edited by hawklord, 16 September 2009 - 11:54 AM.

[Tjweikel24]

has sp1 but updated it to sp3, its a dell dimensions 2100, mb is probly 9 yrs old,(1999-2002) thats when the comp was bought brand new in that time frame. i will look into the bios and get back to you thanks so much.


Went into bios and it reconizes it at like 137...

Edited by Tjweikel24, 16 September 2009 - 12:28 PM.

[hawklord]

1999-2002 - i believe that this may be the problem, you have overshot your hdd limit defined by your bios,

around the time your pc was made, people believed that you could not make a hdd more than 137.4gb in size, so what was the point in designing a bios to support larger drives (be aware that this is only single drive limit, you can still have 2 or more drives that have a total more than 137.4gb)

a resolution - upgrading your bios (not for beginners ),

best bet is a newer pc or return the 500gb drive and get smaller ones

[Tjweikel24]

after i downloaded the sp2, i was able to partion the 337 gb unpartioned space. so it work now but thanks anyway

[hawklord]

has sp1 but updated it to sp3

my apologies, i thought you had sp3, which led me to believe that you had 48 bit logical block addressing in xp,
without lba it also limits the size of your drive