160gb hard drive

[Stereo Steve]

Just building a new system with a 160gb SATA 150 Seagate hard drive. Will be putting XP Pro on it. I have read that XP only sees 137gb or something. Is this true and what is the remedy? Is it something I can do after I install windows or do I need to do something first?

Cheers.

[nfordenfield]

do not worry AFAIK, it is just the way stats are manipulated.

there are issues with xbox and sky plus not seeing over this.

Booting to a SATA drive is not that easy without the driver on floppy i recall

In my experience it depends upon the processor and chipset. I have two machines both with XP Pro and SP1. My Athlon XP1800/VIA machine with the latest VIA 4in1 drivers quite happily detected my external firewire 160GB IDE Seagate drive and allowed me to format the full storage capacity. However when first connected to my P4/Intel chipset machine it would not access the drive until I installed the Intel Application Accelerator. I can now see and use the full 160GB capacity.

I have no experience of SATA drives.

Good luck with your set up

Tony M.

[Stereo Steve]

Hmmm, drive is OEM with no drivers. Maybe I'll just give it a go. Still assembling the machine. Got one of those Zalman 7000 Flower coolers (the new type with integral fan) and it looks the business. Not sure how much noise it will make but apparently the P4 runs reasonably cool anyway compared to the Athlon 2100XP I used to have.

[RobsterD]

Have a look at Microsoft KnowledgeBase article 303013 which enables support for HD greater than 137Gb.
Rob

[Messiah]

I have a 250GB drive with XP and works a treat.

[howies]

stereo steve you dont get the drivers with the serial drive they will be on the cd that came with the motherboard you will need to copy them onto the root of a floppy drive (i think they expect us all to be able to use another pc to do this)and when xp cd boots up press f6 when told to do so and go through the onscreen instructions.

[Stereo Steve]

OK, fired it all up and the BIOS recognised the drive no probs. But, when I booted to Windows WP setup, it showed the drive at 131gb and would only let me creat a partition and format that much. So I did and stuck XP on it to see if it was a mistake but it's reporting 127gb now.

Have I made a partition that is too small or can XP not see the full disk? I've not done much in the way of setting up yet so a re-format would be no problem. Any ideas?

I've tried updating the BIOS but the instructions from Asus are to put the exe file on a floppy and run it from the DOS prompt and not to use the utility. I have downloaded the bios and put it on a floppy but how do I run it? Tried the command prompt with no luck).

Ho hum.

I recently got a 160 gig drive myself and noticed the same problem with XP. The fix is provided in Service Pack 1 I think. However I'm not sure if you install the non SP1 version and then apply the service pack that you then gain a few more gigs on the same drive.

What I did was create a partition of around 25 gig, installed XP on that then applied SP1 and formatted the second partition. I'm not sure what the general concensus is on partitioning but I saw it as a good idea. The 25 gig partition is where I install all apps and the other partition is purely for files. If XP stuffs up at some point then at least all you have to do is reformat that partition and thus keep all your files which are in the other partition.

Anyone here give me some advice, i bought an external 160 gigabyte Maxtor drive, i also bought a USB2 Hub for faster transfer speeds, problem is Computer goes crazy with the USB2 Hub attached the CPU showed 100% usage and froze, i had to uninstall it.

Computer is an Advent AMD Athlon 1700 Megahertz Processor 512 megabytes of memory and running Windows XP.

Steve

To upgrade your BIOS you need to create a boot floppy disk that will boot the computer into, say, the Windows 98 dos prompt. You can get boot disk files from, for example, here. Once you have created the boot disk, add the BIOS exe file to it. In BIOS setup set your boot device to boot from floppy, insert the boot floppy disk and then save/exit bios setup. The machine should then proceed to boot to the dos prompt "a:/". You can then run the BIOS.exe file to update the bios. On completing the update remove the floppy and reboot as normal.


If upgrading your bios does not solve the disk problem then it ispossible that your machine is a P4 with one of the intel chipsets listed here. If so try installing the "Intel Application Accelerator". This cured the problem for me.

Tony M