windows formatting problem

It is a 250gig maxtor. Windows is only alloting me about 131 gigs for formatting, which is the size of the unused portion of the disk.

You have a older XP disk that can only format that much. After you install SP2 you can go into Disk management and format the rest of the drive. Or you can Slipstream SP2 to you XP cd to see the whole drive.
 
Do you have XP SP2? SP1 would only allow about 140GB, SP2 fixed that problem.

And StrangleHold is right, the 8MB is there by design.

Bunk! The SP1 recovery disk used here on an old build saw a single primary go right onto a 250gb ide drive without problems. It created the 238.4gb actual primary as well as formatting it while installing Windows.

While a 1-8mb bit of drive space is only a mere drop in the bucket when seeing the capacities available on drives these days people ask how to see that small amount of unallocated drive space filled in. The free Linux drive tool GParted live for cd takes care of that easy enough. If you are seeing the can't install due to newer version GParted can delete the current partition and see a totally new one created. You then use the Disk Management to right click and choose the format option.
 
While a 1-8mb bit of drive space is only a mere drop in the bucket when seeing the capacities available on drives these days people ask how to see that small amount of unallocated drive space filled in.

Being small or not its the fact that you keep calling it a flaw when you have been told a number of times its not! Post 19
 
Being small or not its the fact that you keep calling it a flaw when you have been told a number of times its not! Post 19

Facts speak for themselves! When using the Linux drive partitioning tool to resize XP primaries seeing that small gap of unallocated space not by intentional MS design quite often following a primary if not seen before even seeing time when space is seen at both ends the expansion made of the primary into those gaps by GParted never results in any problems.

Vista on the other hand now sees an improvement in hardware detection there since MS wants Vista to own the first primary when installed. The updated tools also now see the option to format a partition without installing Windows as a separate option as well as being able to resize existing partitions with the Disk Management tool. MS had to play catch up with what people were finding out when running GParted live on MS type partitions Linux having gained more popularity over the years.
 
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