I installed 2 brand new Western Digital 250GB Hard Drives, and XP is only recognizing 127 on one and only 111 on the other. How do I get it to see 250 on each one? I have the ASUS A7V266-E Motherboard. This has been real aggravating to try to get it to work properly. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Shane Bjorstrom
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This thread on windows hard drive size restrictions should answer all your questions.

Note that your motherboard must support large hard drives in the bios. Check your motherboard manufacturor to make sure your current mobo supports large hard drives.

If it doesn't, sometimes there is a bios update that will correct the problem.

Note: if you have Windows XP SP2 installed and Windows doesn't register the full size it's a motherboard limitation.

Given that it's an ASUS mobo it's not likely that the mobo is the problem, but it's worth checking the asus website to make sure.
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Still didn't work. Still will not read the drives at full capacity. There has to be something that will work. If anyone knows of amything else I can try, please let me know. I am desperate! My motherboard is the A7V266-E by ASUS. Does my BIOS possibly need to be flashed? I was going to try it but I feel uncomfortable to try it.
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I took a quick look at the specifications, the asus website has too many broken links and programming errors [note to self, I'm never buying an asus board, I need good website support] to get the actual manual, the links were broken, but I did get enough from the above page to suspect that this motherboard will not in fact support large hard drives.

I couldn't reach the bios update page, broken link, programming error, so I don't know if they have a bios update or not.

I'd try the european asus website, the one I was using is useless.

But given that the following:


It sounds like it may not support large drives, UDMA 100 is pretty old, as is.

Your other option is to try linux, it may recognize the larger drives despite the motherboard limitation, I had luck with that on an old laptop, supposedly 8 gig hard drive max size, but linux recognized a 20 gig drive fine.

You can download a live cd to try it, either kanotix or ubuntu should do the job, or knoppix.

These are all live cds, you don't need to install linux, just boot up with the cd rom once you've burned the iso to a cd, then you can see if linux can see the larger drives. My guess is it will.
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Hi,

I have the same Motherboard and I can only use up to 50 GB with my new HDD.
I even flashed the bios.


[new user link]

but still no more HDD recognition...

pls tell me if the Flash helped you!
best regards,
jjahn
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Not sure about this claim, the cutoff I'm aware of is 127 gigabytes, or 137, can't remember exactly. There was one intermediate upper limit too, maybe it was around 35 gigabytes, the first major one was 8 gigabytes, that's pretty old though.

As you can hopefully see from the user's posts, XP is recognizing about 1/2 the size, less than 127 gig that is, that's a motherboard restriction, I don't think flashing the bios will do anything.

Unlike most suspicious promo links, this one actually seems to be somewhat useful, so we'll leave it up, although you won't get any backlink credit for it.
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i have the same problem as the first poster, but i checked my bios and it correctly reports my hdd size... its 250 gig WD, whenever i try to install windows xp (its really old copy from 2k1 or 2k2 im not sure) so i thought that windows might be the problem...? would it help if i got a brand new copy of XP? Also, when i use the WD hdd diagnostics tool and data lifeguard tool it shows my hdd size is 250 gig... now when i use the lifeguard data tool to copy files off my 80 gig bootable to make the 250 bootable it does so, but then when i get into my computer it shows that the max size is 232 gig, which i guess is not that big of an issue to me anymore since its better then the 130 gig limitation... any help at all is very much so appreciated. thanks in advance...

p.s. my mobo is asus p5p800 lga775 socket

usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=0&model=166&modelmenu=1

thats the link to my mobo...
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jewgalo, you don't have any issues. The 232 gig size is simply because some hard drive manufactorers misreport their drive sizes. It's a math thing between how bits and bytes work. Most don't do this anymore because they were sued for the practice.

When you see 232 gigs that's correct, there is no discrepancy, it's the same drive, everything is working fine.

Here's a nice article from pcmechanic that explains why:


Read the whole article and it will be clear to you.

But this is the relevant section for you:

As you can see, the 250 gig drive is reported as 232 gig due to the math problem. That has nothing to do with the disk itself, it is what it is, same size for bios and for windows, it's just how both see it that differs.
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right but when i go to install windows it tells me the hdd space is 131 gigs... thats the issue i have... the 232 i got it figured out... thanks tho...
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jewgalo: oh, ok, what you do in that case is create a smaller partition for windows to install on, then after you install the service packs and reboot, xp will see the entire hard drive, then you just add the rest of the drive as your second, data partition.
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