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hard drives full space not showing up

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Sanchmiester

Technical User
Jan 17, 2007
3
US
Hi, i have a bit of a problem you see, i just put my computer together, and my hard drive is a 250gb but when i view it in "my computer" it only shows up with 137gb. can someone help me please?
 
You don't state your OS, if WinXP you need to be running SP1 or above to see the rest of the drive. Go to Start>Windows Update and get all critical patches, it will take a while but will be well worth the time.

Tony
 
sorry about that, but i have SP2 installed, i didnt install SP1 though, would that make a difference?
 
Does the BIOS see it as its Full size?

How is it formatted?



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
What does DiskManagment show for drive size? Start, Run ..., diskmgmt.msc
 
Sanchmiester said:
i didnt install SP1 though, would that make a difference?

If you installed SP2, then SP1 would have been taken care of with that, so it will not make a difference.

If your BIOS is showing your drive correctly, and you have Windows updated, then my next question would be: do you have the most current drivers for your motherboard? Sometimes, the manufacturers will have updated drivers available on their websites which would affect such things as the size of hard drives showing correctly.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me
 
My guess is that SP2 was applied AFTER XP was installed from an XP CD with no service packs. Disk Management will show the rest of the drive as unpartitioned space.
 
Freestone said:
My guess is that SP2 was applied AFTER XP was installed from an XP CD with no service packs. Disk Management will show the rest of the drive as unpartitioned space.

Exactly what happened to me. I had some old Partition Magic floppys that fixed it, but so will Paragon's Partition Manager and others.

Tony
 
Sanchmiester,
Right-click My Computer and select "Manage". Go to the Disk Management entry on the left and look at the specs for your system hard drive. Like Freestone said, it will probably show 137GB partitioned, then the rest unpartitioned.

When the BIOS sees the correct amount, then only Windows can be the problem. However, all issues with drive size were fixed in SP1, so with SP2, it can't be a Windows problem either at this point. You must have partitioned the drive with an old XP CD.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
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