hard drive problems

[goingmerry]

i originaly ordered a 250GB western digital SATA hard drive. when i installed windows service pack 1 on my machine it only showed up at 130GB, i thought it was teh hard drive that was bad and rma'd it for a new one. the new one arrived and i had the same problem, i found a different windows sp1 cd to try and it recognizes the hard drive as 230 gigs still 20 gigs uner what it shoudl be? any ideas what i can do to fix this w/o buying vista or xp pro?

 

[j00fek]

try installing SP2 and upgrade the firmware of the drive on WD site

 

[Matthias99]

With SP1 it should see the full capacity (search for "48-bit LBA" for gory details.) Maybe your first CD wasn't actually SP1? Anyway, you already fixed that. You can also patch it after installation and then create another partition with the 'extra' space.

Windows will report the capacity of a "250GB" drive as "232.83 GB". Windows (incorrectly) uses "gigabyte" (GB) to refer to a "gibibyte" (GiB) or "binary gigabyte" when referring to drive capacity (many other OSes and programs do this too; for some reason people just see it in Windows and flip out.) It's 250,000,000,000 bytes either way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

 

[goingmerry]

thank you for the explenation. so even if i have sp2 installed and update drive firmware i wont get anymore tahn 232. in this picture it looks like i do have more drive space because teh bar doest extend to the end like in my external hd? or does that not mean anything?[