Hard Drive Partition Trouble

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Vanderdon

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Nov 23, 2008
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Hopefully I'm in the right place.

Last Friday I bought a new, 1tb internal Hard Drive (Seagate). I hooked it up, fired out XP professional 32bit and installed the OS. I created a new partition with the default size that they gave me (which from my experience is the maximum HD space, but I could be wrong). After finishing the install and putting some of my basic software on it, everything seemed to work fine. However, after a few days of transferring about 30gigs of files onto it I noticed something depressing: in Properties under My Computer, the total drive space read as something around 125gigs. I'm pretty certain that I didn't do anything wrong with the partition, unless the default partition size is around 1/7th of the available space for some reason.

I mentioned it to a friend and he told me something about a partition cap with NTFS file systems that are default with Service Pack One? He said he'd heard that sometimes they only display a small, block portion of the total memory, and that there is a simple procedure that will fix the problem and display the rest of the space.

If anyone is familiar with this problem, knows said procedure, or can give me another solution, I'd much appreciate it. It will really suck if I need to re create the partition. :(
 
NTFS doesn't have a default partition cap that I am aware of. Make sure that your HD doesn't have limiting jumpers first. Then go to disk management and see if your HD has a huge chunk of unused space. Otherwise, try updating to SP2/SP3 first.
 
Hey there, thanks for the advice.

I've already updated to SP3, I did so shortly after I booted it up. I think I do remember seeing a jumper on there but I've never heard of a "Limiting Jumper" and it was a SATA drive so I didn't pay much attention to it. I'm only familiar with the master/slave jumpers on PATA drives. If the problem is the limiting jumper, will removing it fix the problem or do I have to adjust some settings as well? I'm at work now, but when I get home I'll check the disk management. If it displays the unused space, does that tell me that the problem is just how I set the partition size or what?
 
I checked the Disk Management. I can see the 800 some gigabytes of unused space.

Also, the "partition cap" scenario was clarified to me a little better by someone else. I wasn't explaining it quite right. It has to do with the version of the CD you use to install the operating system. The older Windows XP Professional CDs (like the one I used) come installed with SP1. That service pack is not able to initially detect more than a certain amount of hard drive space because the older hard drives were never that big. The newer OS CD's come with SP2 and SP3, which are able to detect much bigger drives properly. But since the CD I used was old and I didn't get SP3 till after the partition creation step, it gave me a small partition.

Does anyone know a way I can include the rest of the space into the partition? Otherwise I'm just going to have to create a bunch of smaller ones. :(
 
Because you havent got the full disk size partition for your windows, you need to make lots more smaller partitions?
Why not keep the current partition for Windows and use the rest of the space as one partition for everything else.
 
I guess I could. I just don't like splitting partitions and would rather keep it as one. My main problem was that I didn't know how to access that unused memory or tell if it was there at all, but that's taken care of so.
 
First thing you need is a partition manager, as XP does not have a way to extend a volume like Vista does (as far as I remember). There are many out there, but I can not recommend one as I have never needed one.

Also, you might have better luck if you post in the "Data Storage Systems" forum rather than the "Memory" forum.
 
Ah, thank you. I didn't think this was quite the right section but I didn't see that other one so I thought this was the next best thing.
 
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