There are two sources of difficulty that result in computer only being able
to use up to 137GB of hard drive space.  The first is whether the
motherboard's BIOS supports drives larger than this, and the second is
whether the operating system supports these larger drives.

In many cases, a BIOS update may be available that will address the issue of
hard drives larger than 137GB.  If your motherboard does not offer this
support, the purchase of a hard drive controller card with this support
would be another solution.

Windows XP did not originally support drives larger than 137GB, this support
came with SP1.  If the version of WinXP installed on your system was a
recent purchase, it should have included this service pack.  If you are
using a disk purchased when WinXP first came out, you'll need to look into
how to slipstream the latest service packs into an installation CD, in order
to use it for setting up Windows on a 250GB disk.

Here's a MS article on WinXP and the 137GB hard drive limitation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

I don't know if you can get away with simply updating your BIOS at this
point, now that you have the drive already formatted and WinXP installed
(assuming your WinXP does include SP1).  Perhaps the rest of the drive will
show up and you can format it as a 2nd partition.  However, my own
inclination would be to start over, since any risk of data corruption is not
something I would want to deal with.

John Sproule

-----Original Message Below-----

Date:    Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:00:52 -0800
From:    Harvey Rose <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Hard drive size problem

I bought a new computer that has a 250G drive - Western Digitial SATA.
When I run the system information from Windows XP it shows only 137G
available. It is formatted in NTFS. The model is WD2500AAKS. They put
Windows XP on for me. I have installed my programs starting to transfer
files from my old hard drive okay but started run to out of space(Also
putting new programs on). Is the operating system Windows XP Home
edition reporting the wrong space or did they format it to this limit?

Harvey Rose
[log in to unmask]

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