Hard drive shows 127gb when it is 160gb

robd831

I had a Fuj/siemens pc (xp, six yrs old) which had a 2nd hard drive, but due to the bios it would only see 127gb not 160gb it should have been.

I now have a new P4 XP pc and I am using the 160gb hard drive as external storage via usb2 cable, however it still shows 127gb. I have reformatted the drive (right click on drive etc) but the only option for the size that was in the window was the old size of 127gb.

How can I get it back to the proper size of 160 or is it lost forever ?

MercilessKiller

Upgrade to service pack 2.. that will fix your problem.

there was a bug with original xp and all drivers over 127gb would be recognised at just that... there was a fix you could download, but the update should now fix the problem anyway

robd831

for sp2 is it just a free download from microsoft ?

MercilessKiller

yup all free

ichiban1962

its probably your bios you need to update it
if possible

robd831

the new pc is a new dell 5150 so I would have thought the bios was okay I will need to check that it has SP2 installed ( will check when I get home later)

IvanOpinion

This is commonly seen if the drive is formatted as FAT32 instead of NTFS. You should actually have about 152GB of space.

Ivan

movieman

You probably created a 127GB partition when it was in the old PC, with the rest of the disk as unused space. If you go to the adminstrative tools in the XP control panel you can delete the old partition and create a new one using the entire disk, then format that.

You should only need SP1 to handle disks over 127GB, but you should have SP2 installed anyway for the numerous security fixes.

xycom1

^^ I would guess that it's been partitioned at the low size as well. Right click My Computer, click Manage | Disk Management then find the drive and you can adjust the partition sizes.

It will have shown up as 127GB on the old machine due to an out of date BIOS, I think not supporting 48-bit (?) LBA which is required for drives over 127GB in size. This can be remedied on such machines by having Windows XP Service Pack 2 installed along with Intel Application Accelerator.

movieman

FAT32 works OK with big drives, but it's extremely inefficient at those sizes: a single 1k text file will probably take 64k or more of disk space. I think the limit is a few terabytes, but XP won't let you format a drive as FAT32 over 32GB.

robd831

yeap, it was formatted on the old pc I will try the trick of removing the partition and checking that it is NTFS. I do have sp2 installed on the new Pc