160 GB HD showing up as 120GB

[logannsan]

I installed a 160GB maxtor HD, but my OS (XP) is only showing it as 120GB. I remember reading a post about it here but I cant find it..Searched for 160Gb HD. Can anyone point me to the thread?
Thanks.

[bottle-necked]

While searching I found an issue involving WinXP, certain motherboards, and BIOS versions and drives over 137GB. Service Pack 1 addresses these issues but if your XP versions is prior to SP-1 this may be the answer...?

I checked and PCChips Web Site has a BIOS update for your PCchips M930 for V1.5, v5.1 and v5.1a that says it offers support for "48-bit LBA HDD" which is what you need to be access more than 137GB. Unless your BIOS supports drives larger already. Just another idea of where to look.

You could look at the drives properties in "Disk Management" and note if your present partition is using all the drives available space.

Sorry but I couldn't find much on the forum about this problem.

Hope this little bit helps.
Good luck.

[logannsan]

Dude you did more work than I did! Thanks for the help, I've done the SP-1 update at one time and it wacked my system good to the point that I had to reinstall XP..but it maybe time to try again, that was over a year ago..I'll look into the BIOS update 1st though...that was another trial and error situation that ended up badly at one point..Thanks again!!

[bottle-necked]

Hope you get it working
Good luck

[TTM]

I had the same situation with a Western Digital 160g HD running on Windows 2000. My disk would only format to 127g until a ran a disc utility that came with the drive. Now its formated to 160g. My other option was to by another controller card that would let me format to over 127g.