I just installed a 120g slave drive, and computer management only shows 31.5 gigs. I have no idea what to do.

When you formatted the drive did you answer 'yes' to the question about do you want it formatted as a large drive?

Not a good idea to leave a drive that large in a single partition. You should break that down to 4 partitions minimum, simply due to system response time (get 120 gigs of raw data in a single partition, and you'll find search time goes wayyyy up), and data integrity (get just one single disc error in the huge volume, and you could lose all of your data). Also, what kind of drive is it? Maxtor has a utility for managing large drives.

So many inaccurate concepts concerning drives, corruption and what slows your system down. But time is short. There are a number of reasons why a 120gig drive will be reported as less then advertized capacity. 1. It was in a machine whos bios could only address 30xgig and the drive was partitioned as such. 2. A older fdisk was used to setup the partitons 3. This is a newer drive and is slaved to a older drive that has no way of understanding the new drives geometry. It is reporting the drive by the standards it understands. 4. The bios settings are manual and are set to a previous drive. Set to auto or detect. 5. drive is misjumpered as a "split drive". Possible solutions: Boot up on a boot disk containing delpart.exe [downloadable from the web] and wipe all partitions. Go back into XP disk management and see what the drive is reported as. Put the drive on the 2nd ide channel as master or standalone. See what it says. Note: if a drive needed to be partitioned into smaller pieces then how do servers with gigs and terabytes of data function? A "head of the drive" error will corrupt ALL partitions on the disk.