Hard Drive Question - Lost HD Space
 

My coworker installed a 2nd HD to his PC about 2-3 months ago. The original was only 4 GB, but the new HD was 80 GB. He's been using Windows 98 for awhile. I finally talked him into buying XP and he brought it to me to help him install - as it turns out, he got it to the screen where it says it recognized primary master, primary slave, secondary master, and secondary slave. At the bottom, it says press DEL to enter setup. That takes you into the BIOS, CMOS, etc. Anyway, it would get as far as that screen and then it would do nothing else.

I tried first to go into the BIOS to make sure it recognized the CD ROM drive first. I even put the WIN XP cd into th other CD drive, but to no avail. After fiddling around in BIOS and CMOS, I selected user on the primary drives rather than the default auto. That worked and it got past the screen in which it was getting stuck. Anyways, I changed those back to auto after getting WIN XP going and everything was good.

Except for the fact that his new 80 GB hard drive was only registering as 32 GB. I tried installing using the NTSA and also installed as FAT32. Both ways still only showed the new hard drive as having 32 GB. XP installs fine and works fine. It's just that there is a bunch of space on his HD that we can't use. Any suggestions or ideas as to why it would do this?

Oh yeah, the HD is a Western Digital and he bought it at Office Max.

Damn computers. Anything that can happen, will. I once replaced a 4 GB HD in an IBM with a 20 GB. It took a few days to get it to work. The BIOS would only allow it to work with 10 GB partitions...

1. Flash the BIOS with the latest BIOS update.
2. Open Disk Administrator in Windows XP, and see if it registers any empty partitions.

1. Did that. Upgraded to latest.

2. Doesn't see anything else.

Is there a download for the Westeren Digital drive from their web site?

bad format/partition situation or screwed up initial MBR maybe?



after trying the driver stuff you might wanna reformat/partition.

Might try that. Our computer guy says that the Western Digital should've some with a program that he could add a partition that would give him the rest of the space on his HD. The disk isn't here, though. He'll try it over the weekend. We'll see what happens.

windows xp has a tool that adds partitions called Disk management

Start > settings > control panel > administrative tools > computer management > Disk Management



western digital has a hard drive utility that lets you check the drive and partition it. i don't think it lets you add a partition after you have already loaded one.

But the utility is here:

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

Thanks for the help,guys. He's supposed to attempt this himself over the weekend. He's not real computer saavy so, we'll see what happens. I'll probably be installing XP again for him on Monday.

maybe the drive is defective.. I would take it back while they have the return policy and try agian...

Actually, that's what another coworker and I thought at first. But after doing some internet research, it appears that the older PCs only allow 32GB partitions. Something about that anyways. Thought updating the BIOS would fix that, though. But it seems that a lot of other people have had similar problems. It's a Western Digital and from what I understand, they are quality HDs. Not to say the WDs don't break. Just saying that I think that is not very likely.

you may be sol if your bios cant read drives larger than 32 GB unless you partition the drive two or three times

I guess I must've forgotten to mention that he swears that before we installed XP, his system recognized the 80 GB HD. He says it showed something like 76 GB. I assume the other 4 was hidden as sytem files, etc. So, when he had Windows 98, it recognized the full 80 GB HD. Now it doesn't.

Is your HD formatted with NTFS? FAT32 will give you a 32GB limit.
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