I bought a 250 GiG sata western digital hard drive I have windows xp home and have all current updates. I also updated my bios to the most recent but i still only show 137 Gig hard drive what happened to the rest of the drive. can anyone help Thanks joneswoods1

You need to install Service Pack 1...without it, XP has a 137GB drive size limitation. See this: http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=816942

You have hit the 137 GB limit. This is because of the old ATA protocol which uses only 28 bits to specify the sector number, hence cannot address more than 2^28 (or 268,435,456) sectors of 512 bytes. This puts the ATA interface maximum at 137 GB. To get over this you need to have an OS that supports 48 bit LBA. WinXP SP1 or above and Win2k SP3 or above do support 48 bit LBA. You also need your motherboard and BIOS to be capable of supporting 48 Bit LBA mode. If you have not got these pre-requisites then the maximum you can use is 137 GB. If you want to learn more on this, visit my website (Homepage link) and look up the section titled "Working with Large sized Hard Drives, especially 127 GB or bigger ". ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Thanks guys but i am totally confused this is very difficult to do. Why doesn't microsoft get a easier way to do this is there an easier way to do this. joneswoods1

It is no use blaming Microssoft for everything. It is nothing to do with Microsoft. It is the march of technolgy which forces changes to the PC specifications. In the old days you had very small hard drives. Nowadays you have very large hard drives. If anything you could blame? the hard drive manufactures and system builders for increasing the size of hard drives (I would not). Look here for a history lesson on the IDE/ATA interface. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

You are right not microsoft fault it is manufactures problem. I love windows xp and it has come a long way from windows 3.11. I installed this : [version] signature="$CHICAGO$" SetupClass=BASE [DefaultInstall] AddReg=48bitlba.Add.Reg [48bitlba.Add.Reg] HKLM,"System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters","EnableBigLba",0x10001,1 to enable windows to read the full 250 G but still only shows 137G. joneswoods1