I have just got a 160gig hard drive to replace my 80gig as the main one. I plugged it in as the master and put my Win XP disc in to boot to the installation. However at the create partition screen, it saya there is an unpartitioned space of 130gig, shouldnt that be 160? How come it is not recognising the space? Also I plugged it in as a slave to my 80gig to have a look, and although it was recognised at startup and is also recognised in device manager, nothing appears in my computer.

You need XP Service Pack 1 or later to recognise drives greater than 127GB. As a Slave Drive you need to import the drive via Disk Mangagement.

I have service pack one though and it wont recognise it. If I use a boot disk to FDISK it, will I be able to create a 160 partition?

To integrate sp 2, with a windows xp sp1, go here http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.p... Download autostreamer

The newer FDISK (Link provided by Mesich.com - See the last item on the page) can make FAT32 partitions up to 127Gb. WinXP can make FAT32 partitions up to 32Gb. WinXP can make NTFS partions very big. Larger than 160Gb. You have options... Use the newer FDISK to partition two or more partitions using FAT32 or format using WinXP to format the partition/s as NTFS or 5 or more 32Gb FAT32 partitions. Naturally you must go into the BOIS setup to see the new hard drive first. HTH Bryan

It could be your BIOS needs to be updated.

48bit large block addressing, for drives greater than 137.4gb: http://www.48bitlba.com/