Hey:

I friend gave me a basically new 250gig Western Digital Hard Drive. (I know a good friend. But there were some reasons.)

Now, I have a Windows 2000 Pro Computer.
I need to take out my current hard-drive, and put in this 250gig one. I can't make it a slave, as for some reason my non-brand name tower can't fit both.

Well, I took the old hard drive out and put the almost new 250gig hard drive in. I am all ready to install Windows 2000 on it.

But there is already XP Pro from when my friend had it on his computer. So I need to try and format the whole drive.

Now the manual for this 250gig HD says that Windows 2000 Pro with SP3 or higher can format the full drive and read it all.

My problem is, I only have SP2 or SP1 (not sure). So it can only see and format about 130 gigs.

This is my question, I could format 130 of the 250 gigs and install 2000 Pro. But wouldn't there be files left on it from XP Pro? And when I have 2000 Pro up and running, I can download the latest service pack, and it should read the rest of the drive.

But won't there be all these weird files, and stuff from before? Would there be a way to format that part of it.

Do I have any options at all?

I assume you're intending to format as NTFS, in which case you'd be able to use Disk Manager to either allocate and format a second parition (Drive D), or expand the existing C partition to fill the drive, once you have SP4 installed. Anything left on the previously unallocated portion would be inaccessible anyway, so don't worry about it. In the first case, it'd be overwritten, and in the second case there'd be no file entries in the MFT relating to it, as your first format will have destroyed the original MFT which would have such entries.

My choice would be to allocate a second partition, as I in fact have done on my large drive, as there are some performance benefits in having two smaller MFT's rather than one big one. With OS and applications on the first partition, and videos, MP3's and games on the second, I only need defrag the first partition regularly, and it's a lot quicker with less to shift around.

For now and the future why don't you create a W2000 CD with SP-4 slipstreamed into the CD installation? This would allow the entire drive to be reformatted.

NT-W2K-XP-Borg-SCSI