New system built, few questions.

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hungryduck

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2005
Messages
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Wee!
Just finished putting together my:
X2 3800+
7800GT
EVGA NF4 939
1 GIG Corsair
250 GIG WD SATAII
DVD burner
Antec Sonata II

Now, a few questions.....
When I installed windows I couldn't use the full 250gb of my western digital Hard drive, I only was able to use a 137gb partition, how can I get that 137gb partition up to 250gb??? Also, I don't like the abilty to "Safely remove hardware" in the taskbar for the main harddrive of the system. How can I turn this off.
Thanks for any help in advance, time to put some games on this thing! Maybe I'll get some pics soon too.
 
no ideas? I can't copy my music/games/pics collections until I figure out how to get the hard drive up to 250gb
 
Can you give more details? What version of windows? what file system did you put on the HD? Did you low-level format the drive before installing windows?

hungryduck said:
no ideas? I can't copy my music/games/pics collections until I figure out how to get the hard drive up to 250gb
Click to expand...
 
You need to install Service PAck 1 for windows XP at the very least to see the lost space on the HDD. Do yourself a favor and install SP2 instead.

As for the Safely remove USB device icon. I think this may be inherent to the mobo. Not sure though. I don't use AMD now, so I am unfamiliar with how to shut that off.
 
This is a classic problem with older versions of Windows XP. You must not have any of the service packs installed (not good!) Install service pack 1 and 2 and afterwards use Disk Manager (start -> contol panel -> administrative tools --> computer management --> disk management) to combine the unallocated space into the main partition.

If you're running Windows 2000, I think you might be SOL. The 137GB limit is also a problem with older mobos but I doubt that's your problem considering your setup.

If for some crazy reason that doesn't work, however, you could get a newer IDE controller which would fix this in a jiffy.
 
Well, when I formatted the hard drive, the western digital format software I used said that if I formatted it for 250gb and installed a version of XP that couldn't recognize it, that there would be data corruption, so basically, I have a 127gb partition and another 120 gb or unpartitioned space.
 
hungryduck said:
Well, when I formatted the hard drive, the western digital format software I used said that if I formatted it for 250gb and installed a version of XP that couldn't recognize it, that there would be data corruption, so basically, I have a 127gb partition and another 120 gb or unpartitioned space.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Definitely Windows then. Just get SP1+2.
 
You don't need to use SP1 and SP2. Just go straight to SP2.
 
Burner27 said:
You don't need to use SP1 and SP2. Just go straight to SP2.
Click to expand...

You can't install SP2 without SP1. There is a version of SP2 that you can download which includes SP1 along with it, but without SP1, SP2 would freak out.
 
You are incorrect. I have done many systems going from no SP directly to SP2. SP2 INCLUDES all the SP1's fixes plus some more enhancements and bug fixes. It is still considered SP2 though.


Here is Microsoft's system requirements page for SP2:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/sysreqs.mspx

It says nothing about first installing SP1.
 
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