Western Digital 160gb harddisk

[Guest]

I have bought a 160gb hd of Western Digital, but Windows XP gives only 131gb as free space. Is Windows not capable to manage 160gb of HD or am I doing someting wrong?

 

[Michael Cecil]

I have bought a 160gb hd of Western Digital, but Windows XP gives only 131gb as free space. Is Windows not capable to manage 160gb of HD or am I doing someting wrong?

You should install SP1 to enable 48-bit mode addressing.

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Your motherboard must be capable of supporting 48-bit AND you must have
SP1...see the following KB article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp

Cari
www.coribright.com

 

[S.Heenan]

I have bought a 160gb hd of Western Digital, but Windows XP gives
only 131gb as free space. Is Windows not capable to manage 160gb of
HD or am I doing someting wrong?

Three points:

1. Your motherboard BIOS need to support 48-bit LBA.
2.You must have Windows XP SP1 installed.
3. The registry and the atapi.sys file need to be changed. Use the utility
here to accomplish the former.

Reg48bitLBA for Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 SP3
http://seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html

 

[Michael]

I had the same problem you are having now Charlie. Mine
is a 160 Seagate and I had sp1 and the 48 bit enabled and
the registry patch downloaded and a bios that supports
large hard drives and those things did not help xp read
mine at the full amount. What I did that Seagate
suggested me to do, since I refused to reformat the whole
drive, was to use the unallocated space that xp showed and
created an extended partition for it. Now it shows a
primary partition of 137, actually 128 since xp reads
drives differently, and an extended partition of 21.05 gb.
Since I did that, Disk Management shows the total hard
drive as 149.05 which is actually 160 since windows will
always read drives differently.