HD not showing up in Windows, only partial size.

[Archman]

Hi,

I pulled an old spare system out of the closet to give to my bro and his family as a spare general purpose computer in the family room, but I have run into some issues.

It has the following specs:

Abit KT7 Motherboard
768MB PC-133 SDRAM
200GB IDE Hard Drive
Sound Blaster 5.1 Live! soundcard
ATI Radeon 32MB LE video card
BIOS: I believe is the latest available

Now, the system was formatted, and install went smoothly, but upon checking "C:" drive I only see 30 GB (+/- 1GB) in Windows?!

The BIOS sees the full 200GB. I even went so far as to format it again, and do a fresh install, but in regular Win XP setup it sees 30GB....

Now the olny thing that is different is I lost the original IDE/UDMA 66 cable (one end has a blue connector), and found an unknown IDE cable that is a fair bit older. Could it be the cable that is causing the issues because is is not udma 66?

Any ideas?

 

[PurdueRy]

you probably are accidentally using a 40 pin cable limiting it to limit itself to the transfer mode which will only let you see 30GB(can't remember the exact name off the top of my head). Go pick up a good 80 pin cable and see if that fixes things.

Or you can just try to change the transfer mode manually in device manager...however typically it picks the best it can automatically.

 

[TheStu]

Could it also have anything to do with the Service Pack level of the OS? I know that pre SP1 for example, SATA support was hit or miss, and you needed SP1 to get larger than 130GB FAT32 partitions. So I was thinking perhaps it was formatted FAT32 preSP1

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: TheStu
Could it also have anything to do with the Service Pack level of the OS? I know that pre SP1 for example, SATA support was hit or miss, and you needed SP1 to get larger than 130GB FAT32 partitions. So I was thinking perhaps it was formatted FAT32 preSP1

Maybe that's what I was thinking of...FAT32 is limited to 32 GB in size on XP. OP make sure you are formatting into NTFS.

http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm

 

[travisray2004]

Also make sure the drive it self doesn't have the cap limit invoked by the pins where you tell it master/slave.

 

[RebateMonger]

Hmmm...if it was a jumper or cabling issue, I'd think that would show up at the BIOS level, too. Have you looked at the Disk Management control panel yet? See what XP's Disk Management thinks about that disk, the formatting, etc.

 

[Archman]

Ah, I forgot to mention that it is formatted in NTFS, and it is Windows XP setup with SP2.

I pulled the HD out of another machine that had a PSU failure, but that machine did read the drive as being 200GB even with WinXP. So I will double check the cable... methinks it is a slower IDE cable that is the culprit.

Anyhow, once I figure it out, I will report back

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: Archman
Ah, I forgot to mention that it is formatted in NTFS, and it is Windows XP setup with SP2.

I pulled the HD out of another machine that had a PSU failure, but that machine did read the drive as being 200GB even with WinXP. So I will double check the cable... methinks it is a slower IDE cable that is the culprit.

Anyhow, once I figure it out, I will report back

Please do, this is sometimes a learning experience for us as well

I have helped people solve problems that became problems for me as well. Really nice when you immediately know the solution

 

[Archman]

Might take a couple weeks though, since my bro just went off to France with the family... but I will update it the moment I figure it out.

Now if only someone can help with the other posting about the "Found New Hardware Wizard" in this forum lol

 

[Old Hippie]

Please do, this is sometimes a learning experience for us as well

I'll second that emotion.

 

[Archman]

Well, it was the cable! I found a spare ATA 66 cable, and it recognizes the drives as unpartitioned space! Very cool to know it was an easy fix

Cheers!

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy

Originally posted by: TheStu
Could it also have anything to do with the Service Pack level of the OS? I know that pre SP1 for example, SATA support was hit or miss, and you needed SP1 to get larger than 130GB FAT32 partitions. So I was thinking perhaps it was formatted FAT32 preSP1

Maybe that's what I was thinking of...FAT32 is limited to 32 GB in size on XP. OP make sure you are formatting into NTFS.

http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm

Actually, its only limited to formatting from the CD to 32GB, you can use a boot floppy, format and then install xp with no issues