A new 320 gb harddrive indicating 120 gb of space

S

shoenberg3

New Member
I just finished my new computer and it is working completely fine.
However my new seagate 320 gb is displaying only 120 gb of space total. I suspect it has to do something with XP partioning gone wrong because I had to install XP twice.

Thanks for your help.
 
Before reinstalling XP again and hopefully you have a cd writer onhand burn a GParted live for cd image to disk and boot from that. The Linux tools are far more efficient at hardware detection and still have a slight edge over the new improvements seen in Vista as well. GParted will clearly detect the full capacity of the drive if there are no hardware problems found like bad sectors? On a good partition and format of a 320gb drive you should be seeing a total drive space over 290gb easily.
 
Mine was indeed pre-SP1 and installed the SP2 according to your link, but it caused a lot of problems and did not solve aynthing. :confused:

My mouse stopped working, internet explorer became jammed etc etc and it still read 120 gb. So I had to system restore to previous.
 
You can make the adjustments here: http://www.48bitlba.com/enablebiglba.htm, however it is not recommended. You should install at least SP1, and SP2 is strongly recommended. Aside from the HDD support, a large number of important security fixes are added in SP2.

Once you've enabled the larger support, you'll need to either create a new partition on the drive or use a software program like Ghost to increase the size of the drive.
 
I would use GParted live for cd there for resizing the partition. It works great for this. The real question now is what system is this being seen on? Is this an old board in an old case that needs a good bios update? Are the settings in the bios enabled for OS2? and larger capacity drives? The make and model board would be the biggest help here.

Did you look at the total hard drive detected in the first XP installation screen? By default that will show the total amount of drive available for XP to install on. But the existing partition will now need to be increased with a 3rd party partitioning tool for the needed increase of the partition size if it is actually being detected properly and not a Windows glitch?

GParted is free for download at any time from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

The free version of BurnOn works well with iso disk images for creating the bootable cd. The 0.3.3.0 version of GParted is the newest to go with at this time since the ones that follow need special mounting commands with a new automatic display configuration tool called "start x" being added. BurnOn itself is found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/

If you decide to use GParted look at the screen shot here to see how to find the 0.3.3.0 version at the site. It's down a ways from the top.

 
Thanks for your help.
To clarify, my motherboard is a new 965 intel motherboard (for C2D). So i doubt it needs a bios update.
At first, I had a copy of XP SP2 boot CD, and it read 300 gb. However, the installation could not be succesful, so I had to borrow another XP CD (older one) which succesfully installed but only read 120 gb (even before I installed XP, it indicated 120 gb open space).
And the SP2 from the link that PC eye caused a lot of problems for my computer and furthermore did not fix the hard drive issue.
 
The SP2 version goes on later when XP is running normally and all of your first programs are also installed and running correctly. That includes all drivers for video, sound, etc. there. That's the last item in case of problems.

I found one flaw when using the XP installer that most are not aware of when going to partition the drive along with the XP installer formatting it in prep for Windows going on. When looking in Vista's Disk Management tool the 8mb unallocated space at the end of the XP Home primary was unexplained! Sure enough GParted also showed the same 8mb discrepancy. GParted when then used to expand the existing partition by...? 8mb!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top