300gb hdd, recognized as 131 in setup

[MasterMind8687]

Hello, I didn't have a clue what to type in to search for a problem like mine, so I'm posting a new topic. Here's my problem.

I bought a new Maxtor 6L300R0 300GB harddrive. In the BIOS, this harddrive is recognized as 300.1GB. I got into Windows XP, and began partitioning and formatting the harddrive into 3 parts. I formatted them all as NTFS. I then disconnected my primary harddrive, made the 300GB the master, and continued to install Windows XP. When setup reached the point of selecting a partition, there was only one choice, and it was 131GB. So I quit setup and went back into windows. I deleted the partitions, I tried it with just one big 300GB, and I've tried repartitions with no formats etc. Nothing seems to be working. Is there anything special I have to do? Something that I'm missing maybe? I thought I might could use Norton Ghost and ghost the drive I'm using over to a single partition on that drive, and maybe Norton would recognize the partitions correctly. I also heard that if I install windows on the 131GB drive it sees, that I can go into windows afterward and format the rest of the 300 from there, but I didn't want to waste the time of setting up windows to find that it really only thinks it has 131GB.

Thanks for any help, I need it badly.

Stephen

Edited July 18, 2005 by MasterMind8687

[kenshin]

Make sure that the XP disc has at least SP1a slipstreamed onto it; prior to that, Windows doesn't support 48bit LBA, so it can't address the entire drive.

[MasterMind8687]

Thank you, I'll use Nlite to be sure, and I'll just go ahead and put SP2 on it. Hopefully that will work. (I thought the CD already had at least SP1a, but maybe not...hopefully not)

[MasterMind8687]

Thanks a lot Kenshin, that was the problem. I'm still having a problem though. I have 3 partitions on the drive, but I can't seem to get the third one to format. It keeps freezing at 10% and slowing windows to a crawl. I'm going to try to fix it in a bit, but if anyone has a suggestion, please let me know. Thanks again

[mjc]

try a bios upgrade also.