i have a 250g harddrive but in partition magic its only showing as a 127g but in partition properties it shows 268,000,000 sectors (roughly my 250g) how do i get it back to 250 ? its on the primary jumper on my secondary ide. thxs Jon XP Pro Pentium 3.6 with Hyperthreading 2g of DDR2

Original XP has a HDD limit size of like 137. Service Pack 1 or 1a fixes that. How to Obtain the Latest Windows XP Service Pack

There are always 512 bytes per sector on a hard drive - the number of sectors is always twice as much as the capacity in kilobytes (1024 bytes). Since Partition Magic is seeing only the equivalent to 128gb (2 sectors/kb x 1024 bytes/kb x 1024kb/mb x 1024mb/gb x 128), your problem is your computer probably can't see the true capacity of any hard drive larger than 128gb (in Windows; 137gb manufacturer's size). You can check for a bios update that supports hard drives larger than that, but there often isn't one - the mboard hardware must support 48bit LBA translation - if your mboard is older than a couple years or so, it probably can't. Your best choice is to get a PCI hard drive controller card with 48 bit LBA support in order to support the full size of your drive - it will probably also support the full maximum speed (UDMA rating)of the drive, which is often faster than the older mboard ide can support. You also must update your XP to SP1 or SP2 if you have the original XP, in order for it to properly recognize a hard drive larger than 128gb in Windows.

Oops. You said partition properties, not Partition Magic - they both see the size the same way. In that case, if you check your bios and it sees the drive as ~250 mb, then you need to update XP to SP1 or SP2 - if the bios sees only 128gb, you still need to take steps to recognize the full size of the drive - a hard drive controller card is the best option.

Look here. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mosaddique/Working%20with%20Large%20Hard%20Drives.html http://computervitals.com/

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Why can't I see over 137 gigs of the hard drive? The ability to see only 137 gigs of a large hard drive is a limitation of the computer's BIOS. This limitation is found in motherboards which are more than a few years old, newer motherboards do not have this limitation. In order to have the computer's BIOS see the full drive size, which will allow our software to see the full drive size, there are several options. The best option is to search the motherboard or the BIOS software website for information on "flashing" the BIOS. This should upgrade the firmware to see past this limitation. You can also install a hard drive controller card. There is also software which often comes with large drives that can "trick" the motherboard to see the large drive. We do not recommend this, or products are incompatible with this software.