Tonight I decided to format the c partition on my 500 gig seagate harddrive and now it seems windows is having problems reading the drive. When I boot with windows xp cd it goes into setup and I eventhough I had 3 partition on the harddive it only showed one.. and it was the wrong amount. I've since put a backup 30 gig hard drive to bring the computer back up but now when I hook up the 500gig as a slave it's only showing on partition and it should be 3. When I click on the drive it says I need to format the drive.. also a wired thing is that when I click on the drive for info it says it's a 811 hard drive. Does anyone know what the problem could be.. At this point I have a backup external hard drive where it backups my computer each night so I'm not worried about lost data on the 500 gig but I have no idea what the problem could be with this drive.. Anyone have any ideas.

Thought I should add some more information: After booting with the XP cd again.. this is the information it give me on the drive 476938 MB Dick 0 at id on Bus o on atapi (mbr) unpartioned space - 106508 MB D: Partition1 (Unknown) 831050 MB -- 831050 MB Free H: Partition2 (Unknown) 265613 MB -- 265612 MB Free ------------------ Right now I'm at a loss. I did 3 partition on the drive and it should be a 49gig,300gig and 100 gig. eventhough when I went into windows setup it shoed the two patition but when I'm logged on the computer and I look in control panel I am only seeing one drive. Any help? Please

What version of XP are you running Gold / SP1 or SP2 ? With hard drive size and partition sizes greater than 137GB, you should be running at least SP1 though I recommend SP2. WinXP Gold will not handle hard drivbes greater that 137 GB correctly. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Well fixed my problem though I ended up losing EVERYTHING on my 500gig hard drive. For some reason when using the Windows XP disk to boot it would not discover the partition. Finally after a few tries I could see the drive reading 479000 mb divided into an unpartition drive and a partition. So I got tired of it and just delete all partitions and made 3 new ones then install XP. Right now they seem to be working okay.. happy I invested in an external drive as I just don't trust internal hard drives.