Hi, I built my own computer about 7 months ago. A couple months into using my new pc, I realized my 250gb hitachi hard drive was being recognized as a 127gb drive in the my computer section of windows. Sure enough, windows xp was picking up my 250gb as a 127gb. I reformatted the hard drive, re-installed xp, but to no avail. I checked my BIOS settings and my motherboard is picking up my drive as 250gb! I also made sure to check for driver updates through xp, but apparently, none are available for my hdd. Why isn't windows recognizing the full 250gb? :banghead:

:-) Hey CJV729

Welcome to PCHF. Hardware is not my area of expertise, but we have some awsome folks at this site, and I am positive that we are going to help solve your problem.

Curious tho, when you reformatted, did you set the partition size or allow the software to default?

Also, have you run [rul=http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html]Belarc[/url] to see if outside programs recognize the actual size of your harddrive? It would be an interesting test. Could you run it and post its reply?

One of the hardware experts will be online soon.

Look forward to your reply,

TTFN

T

Hi there CJV729 , do you have any service packs installed? if not , go to windows update and get atleast sp1 for many reasons but in this case to fix youre problem

Yes I agree with Joe. If you don't have SP1 (if I remember correctly) it will only show up to 132 gb. SP1 will help Windows see the rest of the hard drive..

Another thing, can you go into your computer management, (to get there right click my computer then click manage.. then hit disk management) and see if somehow it was partitioned.. (if you have SP1 )

First I'd like to say thanks for trying to help and replying so quickly. Ok, now, i ran belarc's program and it had this to say about my hard drive...

137.43 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
107.81 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

SONY DVD RW DW-D22A [CD-ROM drive]
SONY DVD RW DW-D22A [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

HDS722525VLSA80 [Hard drive] (250.06 GB) -- drive 0

So, yes, outside programs are picking up the drive as 245gb/250gb, which seems correct considering drives are always a tiny bit smaller then they are advertised to be....

Yes, I do have a service pack, SP2, because I actually had to get it to install my motherboard's audio drivers.

Now, I followed merlin's instructions into computer management, then disk management.
Here, i found 3 boxes, 2 being my disk drives and one showing a "Basic 232.88 GB" hard drive. to the right of this box, both a blue bar and black bar are showing.

Underneath the blue bar, it reads
"(C
127.99 GB NTFS
Healthy (System)"

Under the black bar, it reads
"104.89 GB
Unallocated"

As far as i know, i hav not played around with partitions or anything else with the hard drive, and obviously, I have 104 GB set aside for I don't know what. Now, how do I allocated this 104 GB into the 127GB I already have?

Thanks again for all of your help!

Try this , right click on the "unallocated" space/partition and select "format" , it should show up in "my computer" after that as a separete partition.