400=180????

E

Estaban

n00b
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Mar 22, 2006
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right now i am running win xp with sp2. and i have a wd caviar 400g hard drive but my os doesnt recognize it. it tells me that i only have like 180 gigs of space. my bios sees it as 386 after format though. any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
right click my computer>manage>disk management and see if you partitioned it that way.

 
when i formatted it i did it as one big bang. i didnt partition it unless it does that automatically. any other suggestions
 
The reason the bios sees it as 386 gb is that the difference between a binary gigabyte and a decimal gigabyte.
 
TheTMan said:
The reason the bios sees it as 386 gb is that the difference between a binary gigabyte and a decimal gigabyte.
Click to expand...


what is the difference between binary and decimal

and also it is a sata drive


edit: if i reformat my drive and partition it will that make a difference and if so how do i do it
 
TheTMan said:
The reason the bios sees it as 386 gb is that the difference between a binary gigabyte and a decimal gigabyte.
Click to expand...

That's not his problem though, from what I get from the original post, Bios see's the drive, but windows only see's 180 gig. Which is an intersting issue because if it was sp2 related only 127 would be available.

To the OP, check in computer mangement to see what the disk management tab sees, update us with that info.

Also, grabbed from wikipedia on gigabyte Binary and decimal
http://www.Wikipedia.com said:
here are two slightly different definitions of the size of a gigabyte in use:

* 1,000,000,000 bytes or 10^9 bytes is the decimal definition used in telecommunications (such as network speeds) and some computer storage manufacturers (such as hard disks and flash drives). This usage is compatible with SI.
* 1,073,741,824 bytes, equal to 1024^3, or 2^30 bytes. This is the definition used for computer memory sizes, and most often used in computer engineering, computer science, and most aspects of computer operating systems. The IEC recommends that this unit should instead be called a gibibyte (abbreviated GiB), as it conflicts with SI units used for bus speeds and the like.
Click to expand...

as you can see about 73 meg per MB is lost when comparing Decimal to Binary
 
thanks for the help so far... i am at work right now so i cant really give that info off the top of my head and also as for 180 that was a rough estamate it could be the 127 that you were talking about with sp2. is there any way around it?
 
Estaban said:
when i formatted it i did it as one big bang. i didnt partition it unless it does that automatically. any other suggestions
Click to expand...

It has to create a partition to install windows. Yes, for the most part, it does this automatically. If it did not use the entire drive then you will have space left over that you can create another partition on, so that you can use it.



 
Estaban said:
thanks for the help so far... i am at work right now so i cant really give that info off the top of my head and also as for 180 that was a rough estamate it could be the 127 that you were talking about with sp2. is there any way around it?
Click to expand...

Do you not want to install SP2?

SP1 will actually do it, but there is no reason not to update to sp2. IIRC, microsoft will no longer allow you to update if you don't do sp2.

The largest allowable volume without large bit addressing (LBA) is 137 GB (127 binary). If it was 127, then that is your problem. Upgrade to sp1 or sp2 and then go into disk management and you should be able to see the extra space. From there, you can do one of several things. Create another partition for the rest of the space. Make a disk with sp2 slip streamed into it and reinstall windows. Or buy a third party disk management program and expand the partition to the rest of the space.
 
Personally I am not a fan of option 3. I used partition magic before to do that and I ended up losing a lot of data. :(
 
i did upgrade to sp2 and it still doesnt show the full drive. do i have to install sp1 for it to see it.
also how do you create a disk with sp2 slipstreamed in with windows
thanks for your help
 
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