500gb drive shows up at 128gb

[frenchie29]

I just reformated my C drive everything is fine except that my second drive (Seagate 500gb) is showing up at 128gb I reformated a few times now and still the same 128gb

How can I get the drive to show to it's real size??

Thanks

[Reloadron]

This may or may not help depending on the OS. Only Windows XP SP1 will see the full capacity of drives greater than 130 GB.

Windows 2000/XP - Existing Installation
Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later add 48-bit addressing support to the operating system (OS). This support will allow access to drives larger than 137 GB (128 GB).

Once the OS is installed (to a partition smaller than 137 GB), download and install the latest service pack for your operating system. After installing the service pack, you will be able to partition the remaining space into a new partition.
If you are adding a secondary drive that is larger than 137 GB (128 GB) to Windows 2000/XP, be sure to download and install the latest service pack prior to connecting the drive. This will ensure proper support is available once the drive is detected. Once connected, you should be able to partition the drive to the maximum capacity.

See the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles for more information:

• <LI class=link_list_large>Windows XP (Article 303013)
• Windows 2000 (Article 305098)

The first link covers enabling LBA which may be the problem. There are a few causes for what you are seeing.

Let us know if what I posted helps.

Ron

[frenchie29]

I just updated to the latest updates and still nothing!!!!

[gvblake22]

Go to Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, Computer Management. Under the Storage section, select Disk Management. Now find your drive on the right hand side and see if the partition is only set to 128MB or so. If you have SP1 installed, I suspect you might have a partition on there that is only of a certain size and you just keep reformatting just that partition and you really need to delete that partition and create a new one spanning the entire capacity of the drive.

[frenchie29]

Ok I got it to work I had to install SP2 seperately

Thanks alot!!

[gvblake22]

Wow, didn't know you needed SP2 as well as SP1! Either way, glad you're good to go.

[frenchie29]

I know it's weird I did an automatic update, I taught I got everything but I still had SP1 I guess so I had to go and download SP2 after a reboot the drive showed up as 500gb

[Banditman]

Just a little side note, some of the Maxtor drives don't have decals on them indicating the jumper config. If you don't get the jumpers set right (master/slave) but the bios detects them correctly anyway, it will cut your drive space in half. I learned that the hard way .

A friend gave me a Maxtor HD that didn't have decals on it so I set the jumpers where I thought they should go from other drives and it worked. Bios saw all of them and formatted the new 30 gig drive and used it for a year. I then ported everything to a new case and mixed up the drives and forgot which order I had them in. I couldn't get the jumpers set right for nothing this time. So I jumped on my other PC and looked up the Maxtor jumper config, and found out that the config I had it set at for the last year was wrong. After I got them set according to manufacturing specs, it showed a 55 gig drive.

[Reloadron]

Glad it is now working right.

Ron

[Quakindude]

Depending on which variety of SP 1 you have, it may or may not show anything above 127GB. A lot of the SP1 copies that folks have require a separate update to see drives larger than 127GB. SP2 for WinXP will show the whole drive though.

There are some folks that swear they will never update to SP2 and this is typically an issue for them.