Computer help forum: new 500gb hard drive only seen as 128gb

Install the full XP SP1 or later and the entire drive should be recognized.. (Preferably the full XP SP2).. Since you've told us nothing about your computer, it's hard to make any further guesses till you provide us with the details.

Hope this helps.

Grif

Please tell all what's in the upper right window of Disk Management. It shows the partitions and unallocated space on the disk. Total should be 500 Gb.

Something like defragmentor only shows partitions, not drives. It could well be there's just a 137 Mb partition (maybe formatted FAT32?) on the drive, together with some 350 Gb unallocated (empty). That's rather easy to change.



Kees

1. Delete the old partition.
2. Create one or more new partitions. Your choice to have 1 * 500 Gb or, say, 2 * 250 Gb or anything else.
3. Format the new partitions with the NTFS-filesystem.
4. Ready.

If you happen to plan to use this disk on a Mac also, the above isn't so good. The Mac OS can't write NTFS.

Kees

That's a VERY good question.

The easiest way out is to leave the current partition as it is, and make a new one covering the now unallocated space. Then you end up with a 137 Gb partition and a 350 Gb partition: two drive letters on the same physical disk. That's no real problem.

Once you've done that, it needs some optimizing, because FAT32 is less reliable than NTFS:
1. Copy all files from the old to new partition (and delete them on the old).
2. Use the Windows XP program convert to change the old partition from FAT32 to NTFS. See http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php (but use the correct drive letter!).
3. Move back what you like, depending on your plan to organize your data in 2 partitions.

And an important remark about backup. If you browse our Storage Forum, you'll find an amazing number of posts from people losing data on their external hard disk. So be sure you've got a backup of everything that's on it and that you don't want to lose. The recommended way to store all those backup gigabytes is, of course, a second external hard disk! But a BlueRay burner should work also, with 50 Gb on one disk.

Kees

do i use windows to partition or is it better to use partition magic 8
and do a copy of old partion to the new partition (ie a back up)at the same time
thanks
skip

http://www.48bitlba.com/

Could be a system/BIOS issue or an OS/service pack issue.

VAPCMD