I finally figured out the master/slave jumper thingie (only took me
like the whole day), then I found out I had to initialise it (took me
the whole night), now I really can't figure out why my 320 GB became a
128 GB. Someone pls help! Ahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
deadharbor:
You've probably run up against the hard drive large-capacity limitation...
There are two basic requirements for the XP OS to recognize the full
capacity of large-capacity disks, i.e., disks > 137 GB (128 GB binary)...
1. The motherboard's BIOS must support large-capacity disks. Virtually all
motherboards manufactured over the past 4 or 5 years have this capability.
Frequently a BIOS upgrade is available for older motherboards to provide
this capability if not originally present, and,
2. The XP OS must contain SP1 and/or SP2 when the OS is installed.
And that's it. There's nothing more that users need do to enable
large-capacity HDD support. If the motherboard's BIOS does not support
large-capacity disks and there is
no BIOS upgrade to provide this capability, the only other practical course
of action is to purchase a PCI controller card having this capability and
installing it in the PC.
We'll assume that your motherboard's BIOS supports large-capacity disks.
Is it possible that when you installed XP, the OS did not include SP1 and/or
SP2? If that was the case, that would explain why the system recognized only
the 128 GB you reported. In would have been preferable to install the XP OS
with either SP1 or SP2 installed on your XP installation CD. That way the
full capacity (disk space) of your 320 GB HDD (approx. 298 GB) would have
been recognized. (In this connection it would have been better had you
"slipstreamed" SP2 onto your basic XP installation CD again assuming that
the XP installation CD does not include SP1 and/or SP2).
Anyway, assuming your problem is as indicated above, after you install SP1
or SP2 presumably the full-capacity of your 320 GB HDD will be recognized,
however, the remaining disk capacity above the 128 GB (roughly) that was
originally recognized would be considered "unallocated space". At this point
you can format that additional
disk space so that it will be usable - you can even create multi-partitions
from that disk space if you desire. So at a minimum you will have two
partitions.
If you can live with that, fine. On the other hand if you want only a single
partition comprising the entire disk space of your 320 GB HDD (approx. 298
GB) you will have to fresh install the XP OS using your XP installation CD
with either SP1 or SP2 included.
Anna
