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Greetings.
3-4 years ago, I bought a 200GB drive for my old Win-98 computer. I removed the original 28GB drive and installed XP on the new 200 GB drive. That is, XP before any SP. The idea was to download the SP2 as soon as possible. Little did I know that XP was still beholden to the BIOS and would not recognize more than 137GB. (I yelled at Dell for selling me this drive when they had access to the knowledge that I could not use it all. Still, I have it.)

However, even after I installed SP2, which is not so beholden to the BIOS limitation, it still will not recognize that the drive is really bigger than 137GB. (Actually, 131GB; the arithmetic is fudged a bit but I knew that.) Even Partition Magic won't see all that extra space.

I have XP running on a 100GB partitions; I'd like to install Xubuntu Linux on the remaining 100GB (or so). How can I make the OS now recognize the true size of the drive?

Ideas?

Thanks much.
Rasputin

PS. I found a few posts that came close to this question but it was never the main question.

Hello rpaskudniak, welcome to PCHF.

The problem is nothing to do with the service pack your currently have running on XP. The problem is that the drive was originally formatted on Windows 98, which can only *create* a 137gb partition.

There are two ways of going about increasing the size of the partition. The first is delete the partition (and thus wiping all the data on the drive), and creating a new 200gb partition. The only software I'm aware of that can resize a partition without losing any data is Acronis, but it comes with a price tag.

The drive has to be reported in BIOS correctly before windows can access it correctly. If your BIOS reports it as 131 gigs windows will only see 131 gigs. You will still need SP 2 to format above 132 gigs but you need to fix the BIOS problem first. Flashing to the latest BIOS may fix that if support for larger drives was added. Another option is a drive overlay program like Ontrack. The drive manufacturer may offer a program to do this for free, check there web site. If this is a desktop system then an add-in IDE controller (assuming it's an IDE drive) with it's own on-board BIOS is also an option. IDE raid cards can run in a normal non RAID mode. If you want just one 200 gig partition you will need to slipstream SP 2 into your XP CD or format it on a PC with SP2 allready installed. If you install sp2 after the fact you will end up with one 132 gig partition and then another with the remaining space that will be available after the sp install.

Dude,
this makes sense. However, I don't see myself adding an IDE card with its own bios, not on this 8-year-old living fossil. I wonder if Xubuntu will be smarter and ignore the BIOS...

Thanks.

Mad,
there is a misunderstanding about what I said. Your remark:
"The problem is that the drive was originally formatted on Windows 98, which can only *create* a 137gb partition." cannot be correct. I had removed the WIn-98 drive and there was nothing left of Win-98 when I installed XP and formatted the new disk with that. Wiping out my stuff is out of the question, though it might have been an option on a newer machine.

Thanks.
-- Rasputin

So that drive was never connected to a Windows 98 machine? Only that 137gb is co-incidentally a drive limit of Windows 98.

In all cases listed above (including BIOS limitation), because you partition is now 137gb, you will have to resize it. If you need to keep your data, and have nowhere to back it up to, you will need Acronis.

I don't think you can "ignore the BIOS". You can fool it with a drive overlay but you can't bypass it. What does your BIOS show as size info for that drive? Also what does disk management in windows report as the size of that drive.You want to be carefull running the drive with incorrect BIOS settings for heads, cylinders etc, I have personally damaged at least one drive doing that. I ran a 1 gig drive at 510 meg because that was all the BIOS would support. The head didn't track correctly and the drive was ruined over time.