XP not reading all HD space

[stethnorun]

Ok so I formatted my 250 gig hard drive, put a clean NTSC (or whatever it's called...the non-Fat32 one) install of windows XP on, been using it for a few months, and now it's telling me that my total hard drive space is only 127 gigs. Now, I know that you lose some space no matter what, but I would expect to have 227 gigs, not 127. As far as I can tell, it's not a Fat32 issues since it's not limiting me to 32 gigs or whatever...it's still the relatively high 127 gigs.

Does anyone know why this might happen? I'm hoping a fix will be something that doesn't involve nuking and reinstalling XP.

[systempat]

Is your Win XP on at least Service Pack 2?

Also what does the Disk Management show? This is hidden away pretty good. Click Start - then Right Click on My Computer - then click Manage. Should show the size and particulars for all volumes and physical disks.

[systempat]

The file system on the disk is NTFS, just so you know.

[EzyStvy]

Click Start->Run and type Diskmgmt.msc

You can right click on the unallowcated space and create aditional partition(s)

Or you can slip stream SP2 into you XP to start over if you need to create one large C drive.

[glc]

SP2 is not necessary - SP1 will see the whole drive - it's just the original XP that won't. However, SP3 is recommended.

Windows will see a 250 gig drive as 232 gigs.

If you don't want to nuke and you want a single partition, you will need partitioning software to expand the partition after you get the service pack on. Here is a decent freebie:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

[stethnorun]

Thanks for the responses all. Yeah I used a slipstreamed version of SP3...I've nuked dozens of times (my own comps and that of my friends) and this is the first time this has ever happened to me. I always delete all partitions upon nuking (unless there is a very specific reason, I hate partitions).

Maybe it just slipped by me the last time I nuked, but that doesn't make much sense either since I doubt it would partition itself (I never have used them and I built this computer from scratch). Anyway thanks for the link...maybe that tool will at least tell me what the hell is going on.

[stethnorun]

Ok looks like it was partitioned. No idea how that happened. It had 104 gigs unallocated. So I can create another drive ( E: ) with the tool you linked me to, but is there a way to merge it all back into C:? Like I said, I hate partitions.

[glc]

With the software I linked you to, you can stretch the existing partition to occupy all the unallocated space.

[systempat]

Did you verify which version of XP that you are running? If you are on original XP ( no service packs ) then it may have trouble managing the partition if stretched just like it had creating it. Not 100 percent sure about that one as I never had to try it.
You can create a second partition without any new tools. To claim the unallocated space. You can either use the Disk Management tool that I pointed to. Or else use FDISK the DOS command.
If you want to enlarge the partition then a software tool is needed. The link that GLC gave is for EASEUS. I have used that one, it works fine.

[Slaander]

older machine might have 2nd patitation because fat 32 is only able to hold max 127.53GB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

FAT32
On Windows 95/98, due to the version of Microsoft's SCANDISK utility included with these operating systems being a 16-bit application, the FAT structure is not allowed to grow beyond around 4.2 million (< 222) clusters, placing the volume limit at 127.53 GB. A limitation in original versions of Windows 98/98SE's Fdisk utility causes it to incorrectly report disk sizes over 64 GB.[15] A corrected version is available from Microsoft, but it cannot partition drives larger than 512GB. The Windows 2000/XP installation program and filesystem creation tool imposes a limitation of 32 GB. However, both systems can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient. This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting utilities. Windows Me supports the FAT32 file system without any limits. However, similarly to Windows 95/98/98SE there is no native support for 48-bit LBA in Windows ME, meaning that the maximum disk size for ATA disks is 127.6 GB, the maximum size of an ATA disk using the previous long-standard 28-bit LBA.

[stethnorun]

Ah there we go. Didn't see that "resize" option. Thanks for the help all. And thanks for the program link GLC. Looks like I'm good to go.

[glc]

Slaander, I think we may have a reading comprehension and/or language issue here - it was already established that it was fully seen in this computer previous to a reformat, and it has been formatted NTFS, not FAT. The issue was caused by installing XP with no service packs, the service packs have been installed, and the question essentially was how to enable the rest of the drive.