[Macboatmaster]

I thnk you will find that the BIOS is OK as that recognises the full drive capacity of 500Gb.
XP orignally only recognised a maximum capacity of 137.4Gb.
XP with SP1 was planned to recognise greater capacity, but did not do so on all installations.
That difficulty was as I understand later resolved and XP SP2 recognised HDD above the previous limit on all, unless of course the BIOS was incapable of 48 bit LBA - Logical block addressing.
However I will of course stand corrected, if I am wrong.

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Your answer sounds better than my guess.

[rosiesdad]

Your answer sounds better than my guess.

[Jaegar]

I also had a similar error. Tried all the usual stuff, resetting BIOS, replacing cables. I see the HDD OK in BIOS, and could read the "bad" drive on another machine, so my data was safe, just couldn't boot from it. I brought a new drive and copied across the "bad" drive data onto it, and got the same problem. So now I'm thinking maybe it's one or more of the boot critical system files on Windoz (XP) has become corrupted. 

 

So I reinstall an image of my "bad" HDD that I'd created (backed up) up a couple of months earlier... and it works fine! In my case, it seems to have been a Windows XP system boot file(s) that had become corrupt.

Edited by Jaegar, 25 July 2014 - 05:03 AM.