250GB only 137GB?!? how can i fix this?

[jmoore2001]

I just bought a Maxtor 250GB. I formatted it in DOS via Windows 98 boot disk, and everything seemed ok, but when I booted into Windows, it wouldn't open the disk and it wouldn't let me format it using the Windows utility. I downloaded the Maxtor utility, and it only recognized it as 137GB, however it works now... what the heck?

I'm using XP sp2 by the way. I just read recently that you have to have an ata/133 pci card to support a disk over 120GB, but a friend told me that was incorrect and showed me this website
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;303013

which says as long as you have SP1 it should work..but I have sp2 and it doesn't!

Anyone?

[Jarhed7276]

You may need to flash the bios on your motherboard.

[John Prophet]

your XP is using NTFS?

[MitaDC]

Your motherboard only supports INIT13, you need to update it so that it can support partitions larger than 137GB, I bet if you partioned the drive so that you had a 125GB Partition the other 125GB would show up...

[Whir]

That's not correct, MitaDC. I have the same board he does and my 160 works perfectly.

However, I had no problems once I updated to SP1, so I'm not going to be much help.

If Windows can now see the drive, try to format it again with the disk management tools in admin tools. I believe that's what I had to do the first time I hooked up my 160.

[MitaDC]

well that is the only reason I can think of, just try the partitioning thing and if you can't get it to work send the drive to me and I will gladly take it off your hands btw you aren't using a controller card are you?

[John Prophet]

well I am a little worried about you using a W98 boot disk

the Win ME or newer boot disks have the newer version of FDISk etc....

Id try an ME boot disk to do the partition....

then go to XP to do the formatting with NTFS

[MitaDC]

ahh JP, "so wise, like a miniature budda covered in hair"

[Jeordiewhite]

What's the point of partitioning in dos anyhow, see soo many people bother doing so even tho it wont handle a 200GB drive? Is it me not getting the picture here?
Windows 98 dos doesn't support larger drives such as 200GB and seems pointless to go to the trouble of creating partitions through a dos disk when you can boot into windows and partition it to the right size and format it with NTFS as fat32 wont be able to format the whole drive either.
Delete the partition and try again in windows xp disk management to partition and format the drive so you can use the whole thing. What motherboard do you have and what bios revision do you have, it's usually important that people post their specs before hand to make it easier to guess what the problem is.
A pci card isn't important, but it solves the problem with older hardware not being able to support larger drives, however even tho the motherboard is old enough to still be affected by the limmitation, I would assume your motherboard manufacter might have a newer bios supplied for you to correct the int13 extension to support your drive.

Just try it in windows xp and see if that corrects the issue of the smaller drive, if not then look for a bios update and get rid of the 98 floppy disk, no need to really partition with it with later advancements and updates to increase capacity with newer methods.
Edit: are you using this as your primary or secondary drive? If primary, then boot up with windows xp sp2 disk and delete all partitions during the installation process and either create as many partitions as you need or just one and then install windows, hope this helps.

[TechKnickle]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeordiewhite

What's the point of partitioning in dos anyhow, see soo many people bother doing so even tho it wont handle a 200GB drive? Is it me not getting the picture here?

I'm thinking that people still use the dos way because it is the way that most of us learned and it is tried and true. Some may not understand that you cannot get the full potential out of a drive using this older method.

It is hard to adjust after you learn one way and then a new way comes out to do things i guess...