WD Caviar 500GB IDE Hard Drive

[Roundtree]

Greetings,

I just replaced two small internal hard drives with one WD Corvair 500GB hard drive. After the installation of the hard drive and WinXP I noticed that in Device Manager WinXP is showing a partition of 127GB and a unassigned 337GB. I don't understand this because it was not my intention to make a partition.

When I go to My Computer and right click on the C drive WinXP is showing that I have used 8.23GB and that only 119GB is free.

In the BIOS its showing that the new hard drive has a capacity of 500111MB. Am I correct in thinking that the BIOS is identifying the correct capacity of the new drive and that somehow I partitioned the drive during setup?

An after thought is that partitioning the drive is a good idea but why is it that when I right click in My Computer to see the Properities of the drive I am only seeing that the drive has a capacity of 127GB???

 

[vbro]

500 Gb Hard Drive

Although I don't know the answer to your question I had a similar situation a while back when I installed a 200 GB hard drive in a XP Professional system. I followed the install instructions but found I only had access to the apx 127 GB you mentioned.

I researched this at the time on the net and found the only thing that allowed me to access the remaining apx 73 GB was "Partitian Magic". After installing and running Partitian Magic my single hard drive now appeared as 2 hard drives. "C" showed having apx 127 GB and "D" showed as having apx 73 GB. If you use Partitian Magic your 500 GB will show as 4 ( or more ) hard drives such as C,D,E & F each with apx 125 GB of space

Someone else with more experience may respond to this thread with a way to have the hard drive show it's true capacity. If they don't give Partitian Magic a try.

P.S. I believe if you installed the 500 GB hard drive in an USB 2.0 External Enclosure it will show as having apx 500 GB capacity when plugged into a USB 2.0 port on your computer

 

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

Two possibilities come to mind.

1. If the computer predates 2002 the BIOS simply may not support drives this large so it will only see 127 GB.
2. Your Windows XP installation disc predates SP1 or SP2. I believe that until Windows XP SP1 it was not possible for Windows XP to create a primary partition larger than 127 GB.

You say your BIOS is seeing what appears to be the correct size of the drive so that points to possibility number two.

 

[Roundtree]

WD Corvair 500GB IDE Hard Drive

Thanks for your reply. I did some search on the internet before making the post. I thought maybe my BIOS was not recognizing the drive because of its size. However as you can see from the attached thumbnail of Device Manager WinXP is seeing 465,75GB. Why its not mentioning the other 35GB's of the 500GB is also a question.

In Device Manager the C drive has 127GB that is formatted to NTFS. Then there is the 337GB that is Not Assigned (Niet toegewezen).
I find this strange since I chose to format the drive to NTFS before installing WinXP on it (WinXP gives you this option before installing the WinXP operatingsystem). Apparently only 127GB was formatted and not the entired drive.

I have installed SP2 so that is not the problem. Also in the BIOS the drive is listed as having 500111MB. So the drive is being seen and recognized for being a large (500GB) drive.

 

[Zeratul]

the 'missing' 35 gb is normal. it is because manufacturers figure GBs as 1000 MB, when it is really 1024 as reckoned by the operating system. so because your harddrive has 500,000,000,000 bytes, it is sold as 500 gb, but the os devides by 1024 3 times instead of 1000 3 times (to get from bytes to GB) and you wind up with 465.5 gigs.

 

[Roundtree]

WD Cavair 500GB IDE Hard Drive

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P.S. I believe if you installed the 500 GB hard drive in an USB 2.0 External Enclosure it will show as having apx 500 GB capacity when plugged into a USB 2.0 port on your computer

[/QUOTE]

I do have Partition Magic 8.0. I have only used it once in about 3 years so I had to read again how to use it. The User Guide gives instructions on how to resize a partition. If I have read it correctly I have full control over how many partitions I make. In other words I do not have to end up with more than an increased C drive and a smaller D drive.

Quoted above is your comment that I do not understand. If you could explain it to me I would appreciate it. Please know that the only thing plugged into my computer during the WinXP installation was my monitor, power plug, mouse and keyboard.

 

[vbro]

500GB Hard Drive

"P.S. I believe if you installed the 500 GB hard drive in an USB 2.0 External Enclosure it will show as having apx 500 GB capacity when plugged into a USB 2.0 port on your computer"

I while back I bought 3.5 external Hard Drive USB 2.0 Enclosure. When I installed a 200GB hard drive in the enclosure and plugged it into a USB 2.0 port on my computer it showed a few GB less than 200GB as being available. If you read the other responses to your thread they mention the reason for some of the hard drive capacity not being "available".

I just bought an external 500GB usb 2.0 hard drive and it showed less than 500GB as being available even though it had never been used. As I was aware of the reason it was not a surprise that I actually had apx 465GB
capacity to store content instead of 500GB.

In your situation I'd suggest using Partitian Magic to create 4 hard drives and you are correct that the sizes you want are "adjustable" so that all 4 don't have to be the same size. I used Partitian Magic on a 200GB hard drive to create a "C" drive of apx 120GB and a "D" drive of apx 60GB. I didn't have access to all 200GB which is why you see an apx 180GB total.

If Partitian Magic works by creating a "C" drive of apx 232GB and a "D" drive of apx 232GB there is no need to create additional partitians. I have a hunch you might be limited to an apx 120GB+ limit per partitian which is why I mentioned you may need a "E" and an "F" drive as well.

If you didn't want to fool with Partitian Magic you could always reinstall the smaller hard drives you removed and simply install your 500GB hard drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure or see if you can exchange your internal 500GB hard drive for an external 500GB or more hard drive.

My Seagate 500 GB external hard drive was on sale for $99.00

 

[Carolina Mike]

Roundtree,
Just use the "resize the partition" in PM-8. When it asks for what size you want just click on the up button and let it keep going until it runs out of numbers and it should be at the max size. If you want another partition on that HD then that is a different procedure but you can figure that out.

WD has a tool on their website that will enable you to make the HD 500 GB and it is under their Support>downloads

 

[vbro]

WD has a tool on their website

I did go to the WD website when I bought my 200 GB hard drive a while back and yes they guided me through the process to have my computer see the full actual capacity of my hard drive.

I was basically a novice on the computer at the time and it's possible I didn't completely understand how to correctly perform the steps involved. In any event I wasn't able to get my computer to recognize the full capacity.

That is when I heard about using Partitian Magic to gain access to the additional hard drive capacity. I installed the program and soon had access to the remaining free space on the hard drive.