Installing a 160g drive

[rc23]

I'm thinking about buying a 160g drive for the new system I am building. I have a question about the 24/48bit address problem that limits drive space to 127g.

I'll be using a MSI K8N Neo Platinum mobo so I expect it will have the 48 bit adderessing in the bios, and I'll be installing WinXP Pro SP1 OEM.

BIOS should see all 160g ?
Format/Fdisk will only see 127g ?

then what ?

Once XP sp1 is installed it finds the lost space ?
Is the space lost till I make a partition for it ?
Then I have to combine the two partitions somehow ?

 

[Navid]

If you have XP, you should not use fdisk to format. Just make your CD drive bootable (in bios) and place the XP CD in it and reboot. It will give you the option of creating partitions and formating them and installing XP.
I believe as long as your XP is SP1 or higher, you should have no problem with the disk size.

 

[rc23]

I'm upgrading from WinME to XP. I didn't know XP doesn't use fdisk/format.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: rc23
I'm upgrading from WinME to XP. I didn't know XP doesn't use fdisk/format.

You boot using the windows XP CD and it will give you the option of creating partitions and formating them. I think you can do that even though you are upgrading from ME. I have heard that at one point it will ask you to put the old operating system CD in to make sure that you have it so that you are entitled to use an upgrade version!