I just installed a 250GB Hard drive in my PC as the primary drive. I’m running Windows XP. It was only recognized as a 137GB drive which I understand is normal. I think I should have immediately after formatting it, done something to recognize the balance of space. Maybe before even putting on an operating system. Well I’ve got everything installed now. Is it to late for the remaining space to be recognized without erasing everything? Also I don’t have discs for my cd burning software. Is there something good I can get without buying more. I think I had Adaptec. And I cannot find Musicmatch 9 software online (I hate version 10).
I think the limit is in the partition size, not the drive size. You might go into
Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management
and see if you can find the rest of the drive as “unallocated” space…and then add an extended partition and a logical drive or two, to use up all the space. you’ll have to format these partitions.
There are other things you can do if this doesn’t work, maybe. Did your drive come with installation software?
137 gigs is the limit for most of the older motherboards. To go past that, most drives bigger than this come with a PCI card that you install with the drive that will recognize the extra space.
Not to be rude or anything, but I can’t tell you whether installing the card after the OS will recognize the space now, because I installed mine correctly.
However, if you didn’t get a PCI card with the hard drive, squirrel is right, I think you can just create another partition (basically the OS will see the drive as two hard drive who’s combined storage space = 250 gigs.).
First know if the Harddrive (hdd) is the new “Serial ATA (SATA)” drive. If it is PM me about it.
as far as getting the space back you would most likely have to “Reformat” the drive again. That means to partion it too, this time partion the drive to 250gigs or however high it can let you, you should be able to do this in the windows setup screen.
For the software you are missing that is very easy to obtain.
Find out the hardwares manufracture and the model number and google those as “Manufracture_Model_Driver”. What “Driver” means is the following, Basically it is the software the hardware needs in order to WORK correctly, something like that. Usually the Manufractures internet site has all the drivers to their products so you can jump on their site too.
If you can find and partition and format the additional space on the drive, there is no need to reformat the whole drive…I purposely have a few partitions, makes it easier to keep track of some things.
yup, windows will let you ADD more partitions, if the existing partition does not fill up the drive. This is what the drive management screen looks like in Windows 2000, this drive has a primary partition, an extended partition containing 3 logical drives, and unallocated space.
I love that program. It should see and let you allocated the ENTIRE 250 GB drive as the C: drive. I had my 160 GB drive as one partition under Windows, later partitioning it so I could accomodate multiple operating systems.
SATA cabling is so much nicer than IDE, even with rounded cables. I was cheap though, and got a good 160 GB IDE drive for $30 on sale
Saw after my post that the other space is already partitioned. Still, I’d suggest one partition over two huge partitions (or even more than just two partitions, if you would not rather just one).
there are advantages and disadvantages to having more than one partition. I like keeping my data files on a different partition from the OS, in case I need to reinstall the os, then I can just copy what’s in MyDocuments onto the other partition that already has most of my archived data, format the OS partition, and reinstall the os without having to deal with copying all that other stuff back onto the drive…when you have 50 or 100 gb of data you want to keep around, it takes a while to get it from whatever backup medium it’s on!
This is my first SATA drive, unfortunately the motherboard it’s connected to does not work with win2k without a driver…IDE drives are more forgiving in that respect if you have to move the drive from one system to another.
And for also getting old versions of programs that have exploitable security holes in them that were fixed in later versions. Be careful about what you get. You might want to check sites like Secunia and Security Focus to see if your favorite old version has security issues before relying on the old version. WinAmp, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and others have all had security problems and the old versions with the security holes are there for download at OldVersion.com.
