Member Panel

I have recently brought a new hard drive, to replace my old hard drive as the master one. I've connected it up to the computer set all the jumpers correctly and auto detected the size in the bios settings were it detects the hard drive as the correct size 200gb, the problem comes when i load up windows xp and go into my computer it says that it is only a 60gb hard drive? any ideas would be great, if you need anymore details please ask.

thanks Michelle

Hi Michelle, and welcome to PCHF.

This could be one of two things.

1) Your BIOS needs updating to support the larger hard drive - As you need Jumpers to be set, this is going to be a IDE (aka PATA) hard drive.

2) The partition is not using the whole hard drive.


Luckily, you can easily check to see if Windows is finding any of the excess hard drive space floating about not being used.

Right click on my computer
Select Manage
On the left, select Disk Management.

This should now split the "Copmuter Management" window into 3 smaller parts. 1 is the menu, 2 gives you a list of the hard drives and cd drives connected to your computer (including any USB thumb drives) 3 gives you a more detailed list of the drives connected to your computer.

If you can select the drive that you have just installed, in the top window, it should jump straight to it in the bottom window.
On the left of the bottom window, it will tell you the Disk # Tell you if it's Dynamic or Basic and the total capacity of the hard drive.

If this says 200gb, or 183gb or something close to it, then great.
If it says 60gb, then can you please post what kind of motherboard you have, and if you're willing to try a BIOS upgrade or not.