Bought WD 160 GB hard drive, only shows 31.4 GB available

Y

yekeraps

New Member
As the title states, it seems I'm shorted almost 130 GB's.

I've been researching the fix for two days now with no results except:

-upgrade bios
-download windows sp2

I've downloaded sp2 but cannot find anything reliable to change my bios.

I have an emachine from 2003. 2.6 Ghz, Trigem mobo.

I'm ready to just uninstall it and take it back to the store, but am hoping for a better solution as I'm sure it's a problem on my end.

Thanks.
 
if there is a floppy use the floppy. wd has its own driver that can help you utilize the 160 gb.
 
Check for a jumper. I think some drives have a cap for around 37GB.

As for the driver, I seriously doubt that's going to be required. I've used larger drives on older computers without a problem.
 
I originally used the installation disk that came with the hard drive. Everything loaded fine, nothing unusual. It came with a little jumper that I installed according to the diagram in the book to make it a "slave". So there are two jumpers on the new drive. The master is my original 80 GB drive and I wanted to have this 160 GB for more memory.

I went to the disk management part and it recognized the master as 80 GB and the slave as 31.4 GB. I don't know what else to do there. As far as partitioning it, I never did. I didn't want to, I just wanted one big drive.

I went to WD website and it recommended a few things. They had me download a file and make a boot disk to fix the problem, but when I reboot with it, I get a "Can't start DOS" error.

They also recommend a bios upgrade from the manufacturer. Is this common/difficult?

Is it possible that it's the wrong drive, not a 160 GB drive? I seriously doubt this but I don't know what else to do.

Oh I forgot to mention that it is formatted as NFTS, and not FAT32.

Thanks for all the quick replies by the way.
 
I fixed it!

I just took out a jumper that I had installed at time of installation on the 10-pin drive. It was correct according to the drawing in the installation manual, but after reading from Western Digital's help section of their website, they mention just jumpering across two pins, and this was the way it came. So, I just undid what I did and after using their program, it is now recognized at full size.

Lesson to be learned?--Check out the jumper setting on the 10-pin drive first, and don't automatically jumper it for "slave" like the manual says.

Thanks for everyone's help.
 
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