Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all,

just hought i'd post a note on something thats taken me the last 4 hours to work out....................

I bought my little brother a new pc (as parts) and slapped it together for him tonight.

Problem is i bought a brand spanker u bueat 200GB SATA hard drive, and for the life of me windows would only pick it up as a 137GB drive.

TO cut a long story short pre 2003 windows XP cd's had a 137GB limitation on hard drives..............had i bothered to install service pack two (which is the first thing i do after an fresh install) the "missing space" would have appeared as unallocated space that i could have partitioned.

problem was that i dind't see the point in finishing an install if i was going to have to bring the motherboard or hard drive back. DOH!

See what cmes of not having the 'net. Had to wait till i gave up at 2am and came home to do a google search.

Anyway hopefully this little tid-bit saves anyone else doing their nut in.

Hey steve that was outta the blue, how did you know I was having difficulty with my EHD.
I gave up feeling riped off, now I feel better.
Thanks again!!

I did the same thing a few months back when I rebuilt this computer.. I just used the 137GB drive for a few months then partitioned and enabled the rest of the drive..

Sata drives can be a real hassle sometimes as well, depending on the motherboard, sometimes you have to find SATA drivers on the net, and run them from a floppy disk before you can get any response from your hard drive at all..

Usually only have to do the floppy thing if you hve set the SATA up as a RAID set, which most people shouldnt

just confirmed it now, created a 40gig C partition and left the rest unpartitioned. Installed windows and service pack 2 and found that the unpartitioned space had increased by the amount that was missing.

Good to see my trials at 3am have helps a few people

C1 if yu want to use that extra space, make sure SP2 has been installed, then go to control panel / administrative tool / computer management / storage/ disk management. You will see a portion of space on you HDD that is un allocated. You can either allocate another drive letter to this or use something plike partition magic to extend the space onto an existing drive letter.

CHeers

Steve

Setting up SATA RAID can be fun too with Windoze, this box has a RAID mirror as its system volume and a much larger SATA drive for holding MP3s, movies, media etc.

I had a bugger of a time trying to get my RAID mirror to be recognised as disk 0 (and hence the owner of the boot volume) when my other SATA drive was plugged in. I was only successful after I updated the mobo BIOS, downloaded the very latest (beta version) drivers AND unplugged the second drive until the first reboot. Infuriating to say the least.

Took me a week to build my machine properly, lucky I know the product number off the top of my head...

gosh, you guys are really scaring me now, but its always nice to know that someone thinks they understand these things!

Again, I rely fairly heavily on the beer economy for fixing the pooter

God bless the beer economy

Just a note for the non 'puter heads..........don't be scared of getting a 200GB or bigger hard drive added to your system, this problem only occurs when you do a fresh install onto a drive bigger than 137GB.

Thats what threw me last night, i've installed a 200GB HDD in my machine ages ago,no problem, so i immediatly thought it was a M/B or HDD problem

Oh, and if oyu have a post 2003 release of windows XP this won't even happen with a fresh install

Steve

Beer economy- Down here known as 'Carton Constructions' as many, many houses been built that way.Love it!!

I have no problems computer wise, just invite my son across for a barbie, oh and by the way need an upgrade.

Missus loves it too - she gets to see her son occasionally.

and just think, if he'd been using linux (or any flavour of unix really), none of this would have been a problem ;-p

Too true.

Nova