XP shows wrong size harddrive

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goldenfrog

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 3, 2005
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I have a 320g WD hardrive with 200+g of stuff on it, I installed it on a dif comp with a fresh install of xp.The new comp only shows it as 127g and empty. I cant seem to fix this. I dont want to lose all my stuff. Any ideas?
 
Xp is installed on a 2x80g RAID 0 array. The 320g drive is on the secondary IDE port and a DVD drive on the primary IDE port.
 
So you have the 80GB drives on one Cable.

The DVD Drive and 320GB on another?



^^^ THERES YOUR PROBLEM ^^^^^

It's not good to have HDD's and Optical's on a single cable....
 
XP is on 2X80g RAID 0 SATA drives. The 320g is MASTER on the secondery IDE port alone, the dvd is MASTER on primary IDE port alone.
 
OOO ok I gotcha ;)

Put the HDD on the primary IDE, and the DVD on Secondary. Try that. Or search the knoweledge base for answeres to your problem.
 
What does your BIOS report for the drive size? If the BIOS is reporting 127 Gigs, the problem is with your board's PATA support.

Is your onbaord PATA Ultra 100 or Ultra 133? The max drive size for these specs (if they are fully followed) is different...
 
I tried the search but didnt find anything close.
Here's the story from the top. I had xp on 2x80g sata drives and an 80g as extra storage. Both the 2x80 raid0 setup and the extra 80g were full. I got a 320g and moved all my files to it, took out the extra 80g and booted averything to make sure it was all working. I then reformated the array and installed xp. As soon as xp booted it showed the drive as 127g and empty. Device manager shows that it's a 320g drive but when you select it in my computer it says 127g. The drive was working fine on this comp prior to the reformat.
 
Go to your control panel and check out administrative tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management, and see how that reads.

I know mine did that same thing at one time and it was a mixture of Service Pack 2, and a formatting problem. See if it is reading your entire disk, if not you might need to mess around in there...sorry I can't be more help.
 
Ok wait you put the files on there and then did a reformat?
Go to disk management and see if the disk is setup as a dynamic disk instead of a basic disk.
It may need to be imported into the new install.
Tho the 127G size reminds me of a drive size limitation.

And you said you had SP2 installed huh..
 
Disk management has it as basic. I have Norton disk doctor looking at it now. I would hate to lose all my scifi stuff, Stargate, Lexx, Red Dwarf, Farscape....Would take me forever to re-rip my dvdvs.
 
I tried all the updates and hot fixes but still no go. The comp see it as a 320g drive but with a 127g parttiong. Aparently when I installed xp on the array xp saw the 320g drive and becuase it couldnt read the full 320g marked it some how(MBR?) as 127g. So my mistake was to have the drive attached during the install. I tried every program I had and others i downloaded and I was still unable to change it to 320g and access the data. I had to use windows to delete the partition and reformat it as 298g. I still had the files on the extra 80g so in the end I lost like 120g worth of videos.
 
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