i've istalled a 200gb SATA drive on my new pc, and tried to load winxp pro, but it only sees 130gb... why is this? is there a way to fix this? HELP!?!?!

do u have sp2? if not then get it

You said 130 GB. Could you give a more precise value?

That number is very suspicious. It is awfully close to 128 GiB, i.e. 137 GB. This is a well known limit on many older BIOS's that support 28-bit LBA but not 48-bit LBA. Such BIOS's simply can't access areas above this limit, or they will attempt to do so and cause data corruption by wrapping back to the beginning of the drive.

137 GB is also a limit for the Windows 98 SE default hard disk controller drivers (ESDI_506.PDR). They can easily result in data corruption if you use too large a drive.

137 GB may also be a fake size enforced by a DDO (I think this means "dynamic disk overlay" program) - a hack made my hard drive manufacturers to work around the afformentioned limitations by making your drive appear as multiple hard disks, each of which is less than the 137 GB barrier. Do you have a DDO program installed on your hard disk?

See here for more details: http://www.48bitlba.com/

Hope this helps.

This post has been edited by azagahl: Jun 30 2005, 07:14 PM

could use partition magic or similar program to partition the drive to fit under that threshold, no?

If you haven't got SP2 installed windows wont recognise the full 200GB, it will only detect about 130GB, seen it many times.