Computer only recognizes 125 gigs free space on 200 gig hard drive

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eighthcircuit

New Member
I put a 200 gig Seagate EIDE hard drive in my computer (Dell 4550) as the new master. When i install windows xp it recognizes that my hard drive has a 186 gig capacity but it says the free space is only 125 gigs. Once installed, that was indeed what my computer thinks. How is it that a third of the drive capacity is gone before i even put anything on it? Is there anything i can do to fix this problem or is my computer not able to utilize large capacity hard drives? It's only about 3 years old so I'm surprised i'm having this problem.
 
I just installed sp2 and it made no difference. I have no idea what the problem is. How does my computer know how big the hard drive is but say only 2/3 of it is free space?
 
Go to the Manufactures website, for example if a Maxtor drive then go to their site and they usually allow you to download specific files which enables your system to read larger hard drives. Though SP2 usually solves this....
 
Aswell as SP2 your mobo needs to support 48bit LBA (almost 100% of ASUS boards now have this and i would expect most gigabyte ones do. Same for MSI, if you have an Abit then you might want to ckeck, same with PcChips)
 
I have the same problem and SP2 didnt change the HDD what is an easy way to obtain an updated BIOS for Dimension 4500
 
I didnt partition mine at all I just installed it and got no partitions it reads that it is at 232GB but only has like 120 something Gbs free
 
dragon2309 said:
Aswell as SP2 your mobo needs to support 48bit LBA (almost 100% of ASUS boards now have this and i would expect most gigabyte ones do. Same for MSI, if you have an Abit then you might want to ckeck, same with PcChips)
Click to expand...

i would like to highlight what he said about the 48bit LBA incase you overlooked that. its in psu101 if you haven't read about it already.
 
I don't know what ASUS boards, MSI, and Abit mean. I have some research to do. At this point let me just ask this. I want to put stuff on my new hard drive but I'm afraid I'll have to wipe it again if i need to reinstall windows xp again (in order for its full free space capacity to be regonized once i figure out what i need to do). Should i wait until i figure out how to get my hard drive's full free space recognized before i download stuff on it (that i don't want wiped, like mp3 and video files). I guess my question rests on the question of whether i need to re-install windows xp to get my hard drive capacity to work.
 
Explode_ADX said:
I have the same problem and SP2 didnt change the HDD what is an easy way to obtain an updated BIOS for Dimension 4500
Click to expand...

I have a Dell Dimension 8400. I updated the BIOS couple days ago. Everything was so smooth. Basically you download the executable file, run it, and a single mouse click, and that's it.

I don't remember the exact location of the file. You have to go to the dell.com (support---drivers---flash bios) to look for the correct BIOS file for your Dimension desktop. Enter your Dell Service Tag code as your search criteria.
 
Yeah I was just having trouble looking for the bios update because I did it a while back but I dont remember where I found the file for the update. Ill look under the dell website to see if I can locate. Thanks for the info.
 
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