My PC won't recognise my entire hard drive

BBB

Got a new PC last week, with a 320GB HD,running win xp pro and it only recognises 130gb of it, any suggestions?

cowbutt

Sounds like the LBA48 limit of 137GB. Surprised that this is a problem on a new PC though. Was this from a major vendor (e.g. Dell) or a small PC assembler?

BBB

It's from ebay (genuine business though) what can I do to fix it? said ebay advert

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/INTEL-DUAL-CORE-E2180-320GB-SATA-2-GB-DDR2-20X-DVDRW_W0QQitemZ230191528331QQihZ013QQcategoryZ179QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

albertross_2

is there an empty bit of unpartitioned disk space in start, run

diskmgmt.msc

BBB

at work at the moment, will do that when I get home. cheers.

BBB

I did that and it lists the other 170.10GB as unallocated

Conor_3

So right in Disk Manager, create a partition then format it and allocate it a drive letter.

Oh, and you may want to consider getting a newer Win XP installation CD because the reason you've got this issue is because you've installed Widows using a Pre-SP1 version of XP which didn't have 48bit LBA support.

https://www.48bitlba.com explains the ins and outs of it all.