Hard Drive question

[Hammer137]

I have a Maxtor 320GB SATA-300 7200RPM 16MB Cache hard drive. What I am confuzed about is how I access all 320GB of it. My computer says I only have a 120G HD. Is there something I need to do to enable the rest of this disk space? Do I need to create another partition or what? Thanks in advance.

[Troy]

Are you using Win2000? IF XinXP then on the CD for the drive you will have a tool to enable 48-bit adressing in register, that's it.

[Hammer137]

which CD? the WinXP cd or what? My hard drive didn't come with a CD.

[Simtech]

If the HardDrive came with an install CD (which I doubt) You can also download the driver from the MFG website. Search on a driver called "bigdrive". After you install it you will be able to access the entire drive.

[Kweegwin666]

maybe this is y my 160 only shows up as 127.. i didnt even know hard drives had drivers

[R3B3L]

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS

[surfgeko]

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS

okay there......

[R3B3L]

[-999-]

Pre-sp2 (maybe it was sp1, can't remember) installs of xp will only use 127gb for a partition, sp2 fixes this, as does 48bit addressing, but without something like partition magic you can't make the unused space part of the original partition. You can go into disk management (right click "my computer", go to manage, go to disk management). You'll see a part of the drive that unallocated space, right click it, select format, when the window pops up tick the quick format box, hit ok. Now you'll have 2 partitions.

In general, I'd suggest only creating about a 20-25gb partition for the os, create a separate partition for program files, and another for documents and such. Much easier to leave your program files there if you need to format and reinstall the os, so it's much quicker to install programs, and it's more reasonable if you want to create images of your os install in case of something sucky happening.

[ano1]

as an addition to that explanation i would like to add this.
hard drive sizes are advertised as their decimal size 1000 bytes =1 kb
when their actual size is binary 1024 bytes =1 kb.
after extrapolating this out you will lose about 1 gb per 15 gb approx.
kweegwin your 160 gb drive is about 149 gb actually,and hammer yours is well you do the math.

[ano1]

also.i would recommend the free program ranish partition manager
for your partitioning needs.thanks for coming,and don't
forget to tip your waitress,she works hard for the money.

[Troy]

Isn't partition magic free programm?

If you won't be able to do all of that then I'll send you an exe, which will enable 48-bit adressing. On my CD, which came with Segate drive there is such tool.


And yes, A good idea to break the drive into several partitions. But I do it in other way -20GB sys-20GB sys-Files-Important Files, so that if my system crashes on one partition, I do not format it, I install in on another 20GB partition and then take everything I need from previous partition, docs, desctop shortcuts etc. And I never format system partitions.


And the Important files partition is encrypted, each time to acess it I need to enter password - so no virus, or any other programm has acces to it. And It even cannot be easily formatted.

[ano1]

[quote="Troy"]Isn't partition magic free programm?

no,but.it's often bundled with another purchase.
that's what you probably meant

[Hammer137]

thanks -999- ill give that a try

[fairdeath]

Ahhhh man, i was sitting there reading all thats been said, thinking to myself, ohhh yeah i can help with this, damn im good! Butt noooooo, damn you 999, knowing more than me . I was going to mention the stuff about the partition and partition magic, but confound it, i was beaten to it!