drjsd

Any experts on hard drive partitioning and the like?

Have 2 x 200GB Serial ATA hard drives and they are both currently formatted to 130GB or so. My main drive only has windows XP SP2 and programs on it, the second one has all my documents and music etc on it.

I appreciate there was a fix in SP2 that let you have drives over 137GB, but now I have that, I still can't seem to extend the drives to use up the whole of the space. Have used the trial version of Partition Manager and it says there is nothing that it can do.

How can I get these drives up to the full size? Can I do it using a software program like Partition Manager or such like, or do I need to completely reformat both the drives and reinstall everything from scratch?

And I put an old 123GB IDE drive into an external drive holder via firewire and when I formatted it, it nows says it is only 31GB and won't copy anything over. WTF?

Are these related? Have new Gigabyte Socket 939 mobo and upto date drivers, so not sure what the problem is.

Cheers!

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Were the drives formatted to 130gb before you installed SP2?

If so PMagic should now work, if you don't want to bite the bullet and do a fresh format. I guess because its trial software its limited? and doesn't work.

I can't think of any atm, but there are other partitioning tools that would do the job. I'm sure some are freeware.

A normal XP format should definately work though, as you have SP2, and your mobo's bios isn't the problem and up to date.

Btw I would recommend formatting your drives into smaller or more manageable partitions, say 50gb each per 200gb disc. So eight partitions

BuRR

Whether SP2 is installed or not is irrelevant if the BIOS on your mainboard isn't capable of addressing the latter part of the hard disk.

How old is the machine?

In these cases, purchasing a £10 PCI IDE controller will fix your problems 99% of the time, as the cards have a built-in BIOS that takes care of the larger disk problems that plague older BIOS chips.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

If that is the issue, a more recent BIOS more also cure the problem.


M

lightning101

Total - agree - check what size the HDD is in the bios and then get it flashed. SP1 supports over 137gb anyway.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

His bios is not the issue here. The mobo is a new skt939 one, so the bios will be fine for large HDD's. That is why I queried the pre SP2 route. And I'm sure SP1 didnt support LBA as well?

lightning101

I have an SP1 XP in my office with a 300GB SATA drive.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Fair enough

drjsd

Thanks for all the replies, appreciate the response.

BIOS is the most up to date.

Had a good fiddle round the internet yesterday evening and after using the dscmgt (or whatever it's called) program in Windows, the disk is now fully formatted. Problem was I couldn't seem to get anything to even recognise that there was an unpartitioned space, but this appeared to do it. It's now all formatted and seems to work.

Still can't get the external Firewire connected IDE drive sorted, not sure where to go from here!

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

dscmgt = Standard XP Disc Management tool.

Yep I knew the bios was ok and a format n repartition would work.

If you had a full version of PMagic that would of worked to, without you losing any data on resize of the partition and re-format, oh well

The firewire issue is most likely to be crappy drivers. Look for chipset updates on your mobos site if you haven't done so already. Or find out the manufacturer of your firewire interface, as there maybe individual drivers available for it, rather than using the mobo/XP drivers.