Hard drive not living up to capacity

[Unseenmen]

I just bought a Western Digital 5000aaks 7200rpm 500gb capacity.

I know it shouldnt be right at 500gb, but its not even close. Its only at 127gb. Thats a HUGE difference. I have had this one happen to me yet after a build. Any reason as to why it might be only at 127 instead of 500gb or close to it?

 

[Trivium Nate]

Have you tried formatting it?

 

[Teny]

when you were creating an partition, did you use up all the space?

1 - Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
2 - In the console tree, click Disk Management.

and check how many were partitioned

 

[eyeCpc]

The question would be what did you use the partition and format the drive with? Hard drives are sold by the decimal Base 10 units of measurement while Windows and other OSs use the binary Base 2 type.

A handy tool to use for finding out what you should be seeing available on any drive with a single large partition is a hard drive capacity calculator. http://tomorrowtimes.blogspot.com/2007/08/hard-drive-capacity-calculator.html

Running 3 WD 500gb drives here, two internal and one external one large partition should see about 465gb available.

 

[Atomic Rooster]

Sounds like he set it up using Windows XP. XP has a drive limitation of 127GB. It just wont see anything above that. You'll need to install Service Pack 1 or higher to utilize the full capacity of your 500GB drive.

You could even create a slipstreamed XP install CD including SP1 or better for future installs on large drives.

 

[Cabbs]

Isn't it only the older copies of XP that can't see above 127GB?

 

[eyeCpc]

XP prior to SP1 saw the 137gb limitation. SP1 addressed that as the drive capacities were then seeing a sudden increase from 10-20gb capacities jumping upwards of 250gb.

During the installation the XP installer will point out the actual total amount of space available where you can reduce the amount there. That's likely why you ended up seeing only a 127gb primary instead letting Windows reserve the entire amount available for a single primary.

You now have the two options of simply using a 3rd party drive partitioning tool to expand out to the full 465gb often referred to as merging the existing primary into the unallocated drive space or creating a second partition there for storing files and backing things up.

 

[wol-va-rine]

XP prior to SP1 saw the 137gb limitation. SP1 addressed that as the drive capacities were then seeing a sudden increase from 10-20gb capacities jumping upwards of 250gb.

During the installation the XP installer will point out the actual total amount of space available where you can reduce the amount there. That's likely why you ended up seeing only a 127gb primary instead letting Windows reserve the entire amount available for a single primary.

You now have the two options of simply using a 3rd party drive partitioning tool to expand out to the full 465gb often referred to as merging the existing primary into the unallocated drive space or creating a second partition there for storing files and backing things up.

+1 for a second partition, 120 or so GBs is plenty of space on the OS drive, might as well set up a data drive on the rest of the space...

 

[Unseenmen]

Well, I think most of you have it right. I am running XP off of an old disc (pre-sp1). I even reformatted the drive and the partition only saw the 127gb.

Not knowing how to create a slipstreamed XP install disc, it sounds like I either need to do that or find a disc with sp1 or higher, if I have it correct. I was thinking of a second partition for vista and have two operating systems, but I dont know if that will cause other things to go wrong or not.

But setting up a data drive doesn't sound like a bad idea either. I want to make full use of my hd, so any recommendations?

 

[Neodude1123201]

Just download this,and install it.