250GB hard drive not working

[olly]

Bought a new 250GB hard drive & stuck it in my PC over the weekend.

Clean drive, so clean build - XP goes in & fornats & says it's only a 127gb drive ? Have checked with partition magic & again, only 127GB.

Have just been having a look round the net & seems like it might be fixed by upgrading to SP2 (which I haven't done yet).

I'll try the SP2 upgrade tonight (& re-run disk managament or Partition magic), and see what happens, but has anyone else heard of such problems ?

Thanks

Olly

[_dobbo_]

Windows has a limit of 127GB - not sure if SP2 will fix this but if not the manufacturer of the hard disk will likely have a software download to resolve this.

If it's a Maxtor disk I beleive it's "MaxBlast" you need to download.

Good luck!

[olly]

Thanks Ben - will check tonight once I get in....

[mcflurry]

Whenever drives exceed their limit the manufacturers usually have a program on their www to resolve this.

Disc Manager or Disc Wizard are 2 such programs...

[judas]

SP2 should enable you to see the rest of the drive, which you can then partition as an extra volume.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

It's your drive controller. I bet the drive is ATA133 but your controller is ATA66/100. There's an addressing limit on ATA66/100 that was fixed on ATA133 (and SATA). A cheap AT133 controller will fix it. Can't see SP2 helping but it's worth a go.

[olly]

SP2 fixed it !

Stuck it on last night, re-ran partition magic & hey presto another 120gb appeared !

Thanks for the suggestions