HARDDRIVE PROBLEM

brett16

;DHi

Can anyone help me .I have just fitted a 200 gig ide harddrive to my pc ,but when i go into my computer it is only showing it is a 137 gig

Cheers

NellyLock

I quote from a message board->

It's an addressing issue. Fat32 is not set up for LBA (large block addressing). The limit is 127GB without that. Many older ATA controllers themselves are not compatible with LBA either. That's a problem for older systems, as they simply can not address that much storage. Everything in a hard drive, every single byte, has an "address", like the houses on your street or apartment. There is a table that holds all the addresses in it, or "File Allocation Table" (FAT). The limit for how many addresses can go in here is equivalent to 127GB for FAT32 normally. To go along with this, older memory controllers before the onset of NTFS (and because HD's were only a GB, or a few GB in size) didn't see any reason to allow for higher than that.

So if you want to use that huge drive, you have to do two things. Get the latest BIOS, Drivers and Operating system, format it in NTFS, and hope your hardware is new enough to use all the space in this drive.

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u can get hardware youll need something like this i believe

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=59907

lavish_2

I had a similar problem after buying the 200g HD from PCW's crazy savings recently. If you're running Windows XP then you'll need to update to Service Pack 1 ( Actually you can go straight to Serice Pack 2 as it contains 1).

If you've already install the HD then you'll probally have to reformat it to get the 200g.

Otherwise it is what's been said in the above post ;D