Which option to choose in the bios?

[ken_tbh]

So heres the problem: My friends computer only recognizes 127gb of his 400gb drive.

We've done some reading and discovered that the bios has to have LBA enabled.

So we go into the BIOS and find the place to enable it and heres the options:

CHS/LBA/Large/Auto(Default: Auto)

I assume we select LBA.

This brings us to our second problem: We already installed Windows and SP2 and all the updates.

Will the computer automatically recognize the remaining portion of the drive or will we have to reformat and reinstall windows?

And if that isn't the correct choice in the BIOS can someone let me know which one is?

I would just go ahead and do it but I'm at work and I can't get this out of my head.

Oh, heres the system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3800 AM2 Orleans core

Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S26 motherboard

Corsair
VS1GB533D2 1GB DDR2-533 PC2-4200 Value Select Memory

Antec 500 watt power supply

Seagate 400gb SATA HD

He's using components from his old computer to complete the system (i.e. DVD, floppy and case).

He's also using the onboard video and sound.

[DarkPacMan77]

seems goofy. I personally have never dealt with that situation, but it seems to me like as soon as you enable it, the HD should show that it is normal again. If not... yea, you would have to reformat, which i am almost positive would bring back the extra space if the lba option is enabled.

[bruisedpelvis]

I know that when I first started up my partitions on my drives out of 400 gigs only 137 was usuable I then downloaded the drivers from my motherboard disk, repartitioned the drives and it fixed the problem.

[bruisedpelvis]

also by the way I had the same exact hard drive it was happening to

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by ken_tbh So we go into the BIOS and find the place to enable it and heres the options: CHS/LBA/Large/Auto(Default: Auto) I assume we select LBA.

No, just leave it on AUTO.

Originally Posted by ken_tbh This brings us to our second problem: We already installed Windows and SP2 and all the updates.

Did the WinXP CD already have SP1 or SP2 on it? If not, that's the reason you're only seeing 127GB. WinXP needs SP1 or SP2 to recognize hard drives over 132GB.

Originally Posted by ken_tbh Will the computer automatically recognize the remaining portion of the drive or will we have to reformat and reinstall windows?

Did you look in Disk Management yet? The unallocated space should be listed and you can just create more partitions and format them so that Windows can use the entire hard drive.

Another alternative would be to slipstream Sp2 into WinXP and start over by formatting and reinstalling WinXP with SP2 slipstreamed into it.

Cricket