Hard Drive Help

[Blaze018]

Hey all. I just signe dup with this account because I needed some help. now before you read on, let me just state that I am completely clueless when it comes to almost all PC things.

I just recieved my Maxtor Maxline III 7L300R0 300GB ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16mb Buffer in the mail today. I have it installed in my PC and all set up (formatted etc). My problem is that only 127GB is showing up instead of the 300GB I should be getting. I read a few other posts on this problem but was unable to figure out what to do due to the fact that I have no idea what SP1 and SP2 and everything else were. All I know is that I am using an ASUS A7N8X motherboard (FSB 400MHz) which I purchases in March of last year. I was wondering if I could get some help on how I would be able to get back the space that I am missing.

I was reading that some motherboard sonly allow around 130GB per partition so I was wondering if maybe I separated my hard drive in 3 different partitions of under 90gb each if I will be able to use all my space that way?

[Mesaeus]

Do you have SP1 installed ? You can check this under Control Panel/System/General. If there's no mention of either Service Pack 1 or 2, you'll have to install either of those (2 would be best) because SP1 included updates to work around the 137Gig limit you encounter. It's an ATA adressing limitation, so partitioning won't help to get you more.

[Blaze018]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=17d997d2-5034-4bbb-b74d-ad8430a1f7c8&displayLang=en&oRef=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2fdownloads%2fresults.aspx%3fpocId%3d%26freetext%3dservice%2520p ack%25202%26DisplayLang%3den

would that be the correct service pack? I attempted to install that one and it told me that "The version of Service Pack installed on your computer is lower than what is necessary to apply this hotfix. At minimum, you must have service pack 2 installed."

[kev7555]

That's just a single hotfix. You need to locate Service pack 2.

There should be links to this @ v4 Windows update website.

Also, sometimes you have to enable large disk support in XP, though a window for this usually pops up when trying to install the larger drive. You should be able to find tools to enable large disk support by right clicking on "my computer", "manage", then "disk managment".

-Kev

[jayb1234]

The one you want is on this (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/winxpsp2.mspx) page. The one you linked to is an update to the SP2 package.

[Blaze018]

Hey, I just wanted to thank you guys for all of your help. I was able to get my hard drive working!! All I needed was SP2