200GB HDD showing 127GB

i just bought a 200GB(8mb cache) IDE seagate harddrive and it is installed on my ATA100 IDE controller card (as my onboard ide slots are all full) i formatted in the NTFS partition but it has only formatted a partition of 127GB, this cant be right??shouldnt it be around 186GB??

Any help would be great
btw its xp pro, used partition magic 8, deleted the partition and same thing using the standard windows xp format utility

update yer bios

msdos fdisk rules

yea could try fdisk

i didnt think would need to update my bios, its only 6 months old
its a p4 system with an asus mobo i would have thought it could support that
its fine with 160GB

you would be surprised, have you searched google to see if others are having issues with the same motherboard?

although your board may have been purchaed 6 months ago whos to say it wasn't sitting on the dealer or suppliers shelf for 3 months?

Its the best place to start imo. Worth checking regardless of any problems too.

my board isnt that old a model but thanks anyway i figured out the problem
for some reason 'large disk' support was not enabled in windows so it could only see the first 137GB

I had that same prob and I couldnt work out how to fix it ...
If U do Find out what the problem is PLEASE let me know ... I would be very interested

ahh large disk support
WSorry didnt read

xsv_nrg - to save u a bit of time to fix this heres how i did it

go to regedit(u can type it in 'run')
go to this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters

then add a new string in that menu and name it 'EnableBigLba'
click the new value, set it to 1, then click OK.
Restart ur computer and it should work

Why are are hard drives smaller than their stated size (for example 37.2 gb for a 40gb HD)?

because there are 1024kb in a mb. so therefor 200,000,000kb(200gb) is only 195,312mb (195gb)

but that still dont work out....where does the rest of the space go when formatting...system volume information?

The problem lies with the different number systems

Hard Drive manufacturers state the capacity of their drives in decimal Bytes, while the computers and OS's that use these drives work in Binary (base 2)

For example (using Binary) 1024MB is 1GB (1073741824B) yet a decimal GB is 1000000000B...... expand that discrepency over 40 times and you get a difference of about 2.75GB

I believe that there is currently a class action against Hard Drive manufacturers over this cunning piece of mathematical deception......

The style of formatting accounts for some of the loss aswell.

could this be a result of a partition you perform on the hard disk, I remember when I did that to my older hard drives, and then you lose a certain proportion of your disk space afterwards

ATA100 only had support for 127GB initially, just like back in the day you couldnt use HDDs bigger than 8.4GB.

Some BIOSs are upgradeable to the ATA133 standard which supports way way way bigger drives. The speed stays the same but you know, the BIOS can actually address the larger drive.

You can always get an ATA 133 PCI card if the BIOS upgrade dont work, I think...

its to do with block and cluster size son

your on the write track ...

do a bit of research into how layer one compression works ... you'll find half an awnser there ...

cher