Thread: Hard Drive capacity not as expected

I bought a new 250 Gb PATA (IDE) hard drive yesterday, but when I installed Windows XP Home on it today, it recognised the drive as only being of 131 Gb in capacity.

The seller is of good repute so I hesitate to conclude that they have supplied me with a smaller drive than I asked for, so I am wondering if I have inadvertently forgotten to make a setting to allow the drive to be 'seen' as 250 Gb.

I am aware that nominal and formatted capacities do vary, but in this case surely there must be something amiss, as there's a lot of difference between 250 Gb and 131 Gb!

My machine is a standard PC running IDE drives.

Further to the above posting by myself, the matter has now been sorted out. The new hard drive was partitioned by the Win XP Home installation programme, and at that stage it was just the basic install disc that was in the drive.

Once I had installed Service Packs 1 and 2, Win XP could "see" the unused 105 gb space still remaining on the 250 Gb drive, and I was then able to partition and format accordingly.

I now have access to the full capacity of this new hard drive.

Hope you don't mind me saying this but SP2 already incorporates SP1. The same will happen next year with SP3, 1 and 2 will be incorporated in the update so no need to install the service packs individually. Thanks for the feedback when you solve your own problems as I think this definately helps other forum members whom browse here but maybe don't post.

Hello Fabler,

Thank you for your reply to my post. I certainly do not mind you pointing out that Windows XP service Pack 2 incorporates all the updates contained in Service Pack 1. If I had known that I could have saved quite a bit of time by omitting to install Service Pack 1 and going directly to install Service Pack 2.

If I have another 'disaster' requiring a total re-installation of my operating system, I will remember your advice and hence save quite a bit of time.

I suppose I could just throw away my Service Pack 1 CD-ROM?

Thanking you again,

Michael