Disc partitioning with an older bios

[ButchN]

I did a search, but nothing came up with what I'm looking for.

Here's the scenario:

My GF's kid has an HP Pavilion 753N & the OEM 80 GB HDD went south last week.

While at a computer show yesterday I picked up a new WD 320 GB drive for $50.

When I installed it while the BIOS (which according the HP's site, is current) read it as a 320 GB, good, but XP Home would only let me "have" 130 GB & that's all it saw.

There was no option to partion the 320 into multiple partions since it didn't "see" it.

So my question is, is there a software that will free up & allow me to use the remaining & "hidden" 190 GB & make it one large "C" drive?

Thanks.

[puntoMX]

Check out http://www.msfn.org/board/Enable48BitLBA_B...ier_t78592.html

Try to update your BIOS, that could help also.

Moving this topic to the hardware forum .

[bonestonne]

it may be a limit with Windows XP Home Edition. my sister had a similar problem with her 160gb drive, only she could only use 120gb.

and i had theorized that it was the recovery partition, however when i reformatted the drive for her new computer, the recovery partition was only 4gb, so there was nearly 40 gigs completely unpartitioned.

XP Professional doesn't have the issue, to my knowledge just Home Edition.

[Zxian]

@bonestonne - It's not a limitation of XP Home. The only version of Windows that has a disk size limit is the XP Starter Edition.

@ButchN - What service pack are you running? The 137GB barrier is one found on Windows XP with no service packs installed. Make sure you're running Service Pack 2 on that machine.

What does Disk Management say for the disk size?

[ButchN]

Upon initial install it's the basic XP home CD, the full version, not an upgrade version even though it does ask me to put in a 98/2000, Millenium CD 1st upon install then prompts me to put back the XP CD!

This CD is the 1st version of XP that came out that I bought way back when.

SP 2 is now installed as I had to go through several updates.

If I understand what your asking, I should be able to somehow get SP2 to recognize & recover the "lost" space?

Thanks for moving this thread. I wasn't sure if I should have put it in hardware or software since this "issue" involves both!

Oh, & as I wrote, according to HP's site for the PC in question, the BIOS is up to date.

[Zxian]

This CD is the 1st version of XP that came out that I bought way back when.

Bingo. That's been the cause of your problems. LBA support was only added after Service Pack 1. If you want to avoid this problem in the future, you can follow the guides on this site to integrate SP2 into your installation CD.

Now that you've got SP2 installed, check out Disk Management to see if your computer recognizes the extra space now.

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage. In the left hand side, click on Disk Management. You should see your disk there with a single partition of about 137GB.

You can create a new partition in the empty space from here. If you want to expand the current partition, you'll need to find a third party disk management program to do that for you. Otherwise, you can slipstream SP2 and start from scratch.

[nmX.Memnoch]

LBA support was only added after Service Pack 1.

To state that correctly, it's 48-bit LBA support that was added with SP1.

[Zxian]

Thanks memnoch.

[ButchN]

Thanks for the help guys.

I'm gonna make an attempt at the slipstreaming I read about from the link in this thread since my GF's kid is pretty much PC illiterate & doesn't know the difference from a C & D drive, believe it or not!

I've never done a slipstream since I never knew you could combine service pack with an original CD & make a new updated CD so it should be interesting to say the least how it turns out!

[Zxian]

Let us know how things go. By far the easiest tool to use to slipstream service packs and hotfixes is nLite. It's a pretty step-by-step program, and there isn't really too much where you can go wrong (as long as you're not removing any Windows components).