xp pro only lets me use half of hard drive?

[acrylic man]

Hi everyone, thanks advance to anyone who can help me!

I had a copy of windows xp home installed on my pc, i have the disk for it and also have a xp pro disk. I had an urge to install xp pro and deleted the partitioned drive with the old xp home installation on it. I have a 300GB HD and when i inserted the xp pro disk it says i have 1xxxxxxmb (may be wrong number of x's) free on an unpartitioned drive and there was no other partitions. I thought this was odd as there should be 2xxxxxxmb (close to 300,000mb) for a 300gb HD and i can't remember the exact reason but i restarted the pc with the windows xp home disk and it shows the 2xxxxxx unparitioned drive amount like normal. When i put in the xp pro disk it shows the 1xxxxxx number. I thought this was odd as hell but i decided to install xp pro anyway.

When it finished it says there is a 127gb of hard drive. 2gb being used. When xp home was installed i have 274gb the normal number for a formatted 300gb hard drive. What the hell is going on!

[RJ]

Your XP pro is too old. It's from a time before SP1, and therefore it can only handle up to 127 GB (because of the old 28bit LBA adressing).

In order to get your WinXP Pro recognize the full 279 GB of the hard drive, you need to integrate at least SP1. That'll add the 48bit LBA adressing, which allows to address the space beyond 127 GB.

RJ

[acrylic man]

by intergrate do you mean install service pack one or get hold of a copy of xp pro with service pack one included on the disk as it installs?

[RJ]

do you mean install service pack one

No, I didn't mean that. But. . you can install SP1 after you installed XP, then you can access the other half of the hard drive as well and create a new partition.
But if you want to have XP recognize the hard drive from the beginning, you have to integrate SP1 or 2.

or get hold of a copy of xp pro with service pack one included on the disk

Actually I meant to create one yourself.

The process of integrating a SP is also called slipstreaming. There are numerous guides for this.
Basically, you need to download the entire Service Pack, you need to copy the contents of the XP Pro CD to your hard drive, then integrate the SP into the contents of your XP CD, and finally burn a new one.

RJ

[bailey]

install sp-2, it is better than sp-1 , more updates.

[acrylic man]

i also have a seperate sp2 cd, if i install that, that would give me access to the rest of my hard drive but it would create a new partition your saying and i couldn't use the hard drive as one big hard drive, i need to slipstream to be able to do that

[RJ]

Yep, you got it.

RJ