Topic: Windows Service pack help

[Tye]

 Well after over 7 years my C drive shit the bed and I went out and bought a 320 gb drive and ran my reinstall disc for Windows (version 5.1)  Well of course without the new service pack (2) it will not recognize over 127 gb of my drive.
 I have tried to d/l SP2 but it appears to be for Windows 2003 which I have Windows XP Home Edition 2001
it will not work so do I have to grab service pack 1 then 2 ?  I am having fun recovering programs I used daily
this is the only thing I can't get to work any ideas? On a good note all of my audio/video/photo files were safely backed up on an external drive

[John Kary]

Windows XP Service Packs should be available through Windows Update.  http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

And actually, I think Windows XP SP3 was released on Windows Update very recently, so you may be stuck using that.

[Tye]

After the 6th attempt Service Pack 2 finally installed successfully. However it still only recognizes 127 gb of my 320gb drive Is there something else I need? 

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

What brand of HD is it?

You should be able to download a utility from the HD makers website that will tell XP how to see all 320GB of the drive.

[sygdwm]

sounds like the bios needs to be flashed.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

sounds like the bios needs to be flashed.

Yep. I should have thought of that.

You basically have 2 options:

1. Get software from the drive maker to trick windows into allowing greater than 127GB drives.
2. Update your bios, so that it will recognize >127GB drives.

Updating your Bios is easier than it sounds. I'd go that route.

[terrapinj]

i'd suggest you check out the disk management before you try fucking with Bios

perhaps it set an unformatted partition or something when the new drive was installed?

[SmokinJoe]

There are things like partition magic, which might work, but it probably is a BIOS limitation if you have a 7 year old computer, and there probably isn't an updated BIOS for that either.

See if you can use the windows disk management to make another partition out of the other space.  If so, then it's not a BIOS issue, and partition magic should work.  If it doesn't work then it's a BIOS issue.

I feel obliged to to tell a story of a relate problem we had several times at work.  We bought 250gb drives and slaved them into Windows2000 engineering workstations.  They came preformatted with NTFS to 250gb.  They would work great until you put 128gb +1byte on there, and then the drive became corrupt.  It's a documented issue and very repeatable.  In our case, XP worked OK... but I mention this because I would hate to see that happen to you when you try to load on your 129th show.  Bottom line, for reliability, if you can get an OS to format a disk it should be stable.  If you use some other magic wand, or slave it into another computer and format it there, be careful.

[Tye]

i'd suggest you check out the disk management before you try fucking with Bios

perhaps it set an unformatted partition or something when the new drive was installed?

Sorry guys forgot about this thread, been way too busy. I think you are on the right track , it appears when I reloaded windows it did seem to set up another partition. When I start up I have to select which Window XP to run. Can I just get rid of the duplicate partition and that's it

[Tye]

bump

[terrapinj]

you can generally merge partitions with disk management but im not sure if you can if one of the partitions contains the system info but you can certainly try

[Tye]

I just figured out how to partition and format the remaining 170gb which seems to have worked. Thanks for the advice everyone +T