500gb but only 127gb
 

i bought a new western digital sata 500gb greenpower hard drive and when i try to install windows xp pro it shows that i only have 127 on the hard drive. when i format with the westerdigital disk it shows that i have my full 500gb. and when i boot xp i cant load f6 to install raid drivers. :(. can any one help me>> :).

and also i got xp installed on hd and i could load it up. so if thers a way to unlock the rest from xp let me know

Two different issues here.

1) older computers did not support large drives. . Sometimes there is a BIOS setting that will allow you to enable Large Block Addressing(LBA) on a harddrive. If not then you may have to get a BIOS update to fic the issue.

2) Windows XP did not support large drives either (137 gig limit) This was addressed in a hot fix for SP1 installation.

Here is what Microsoft has to say:
How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP
It will also explain how to enable LBA on some drives/bioses.

If you cannot get an BIOS update then the fix would be to re-partition your harddrive to use a 130 gig partition to install XP in and then use Disc management in XP to format the other unallocated space into a storage partition.

Your motherboard must support a hardware RAID array in order to install the drivers...if not and you still wish to set up a RAID array you can install software RAID applications after the operating system is installed.

Right click "My computer" > manage > disc management> in the lower right window find the unallocated space and right click on it and choose to either partition or format.

i looked for the 48bit lba option before and could not find it. i do have xp installed on the 500gb hd and when i looked for the rest of the space on disk management i only see the 137 and nothing else.

when i enabel raid on the motherboard and reboot it tells me to push f10 to do that raid thind but i dont know what to put it on, and every one that i do and try to install xp or reformat, it cant find a hd at all.

RAID requires at least 2 or more harddrives preferably matched in size...2 partitions is not the same as 2 harddrives.

look again for the unallocated space in device manager. If it shows the drive with 132g then it should show the unallocated.

the unallocated portion is not ther but it might not matter becouse i bought a xp pro sp2 cd and hopefully it will work.

is ther any thing i have to do like uninstall xp or erease all data from hd before installing the new xp???????????????????

Just boot to the CD and it will allow you to delete the old partition and reformat the new one before installation. Read the prompts!