I have replaced a defective 250 GB HD on my laptop with a new 250 GB HD. I am now in the process of preparing the new hard drive to be able to install windows xp. I am using a boot disk to boot up and to run fdisk and format the new drive. However when I run fdisk it only will partition the primary drive up to 4.1 GB. I checked and the BIOS IS recognizing the full 250 GB. Could this be a problem with the FDISK itself? Any suggestions on how to fix this? ***Note: I didn't have a boot disk so I am using the "Custom XP Fresh Install Bootable CD" that I downloaded from http://www.bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm.

It's indeed an FDISK problem. The Windows XP installation CD is bootable by itself. At a point of installation, you will be asked for the harddisk (if more than one is available) and the partition, to install to. Here you can also change the partition size, if needed, and create a second partition, if you like. If you use FDISK, you can create only FAT32 partitions. I don't know, if that is, what you want. Please send a reply, if you solved the problem !!!

Right. You don't need Fdisk. Just Partition and format when you do the install of the OS. EEOC

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk ------------------- Simplified version of the above Fdisk article: How to Format: Use a 95 or 98 start up disk Boot to A: Fdisk Delete Partition or logical drive Delete primary DOS partition if fat16 or fat32 Delete Non DOS if NTFS Next Create DOS partition Create primary DOS partition Do you wish to use max size?_______Y Reboot to A: format C: You have FAT32 If you want NTFS you can convert later. http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to Use Convert.exe to Convert a Partition to the NTFS File System http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... Overview of FAT, HPFS, and NTFS File Systems http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to partition and format a hard disk in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to install or upgrade to Windows XP