A bit of a strange problem really, I recently purchased a brand new 120gb hdd. I installed it and bios detected it no problems. However when I initilised and formatted it it only showed up as a 32 gigabyte disk. Its set as cable select and bios detects it as the primary slave fine. I tried using partition commander and that also detected the drive as a 32gig drive. I was thinking it could be something to do with the way that I installed windows. Instead of installing it as a NTFS file system I utillized the fat32 option. Could this be the problem and if so how can I get round this so I can use all of my new HDD?

Hi Yep XP doesn't create partitions of fat32 over 32G. You can get around this by paritioning the rest of the drive into partitions of 32G or less. Win98 will allow partitions of greater than 32G for fat32.

If you formatted your drive as a FAT32 partition using the Windows XP CD you will be limited to a maximum partition size of 32GB even though FAT32 allows much bigger partition sizes. If you want one any bigger than this for your XP setup using FAT32 without using multiple partitions, you'll need to use a Windows 98 or ME bootdisk (you can download a floppy disk image from http://www.bootdisk.com) to FDisk & format the drive before starting the XP setup process.

Just format it using NTFS, using fat32 does give you a very, very small speed boost but you'll have to worry about the disk corruption, especially after an unexpected power failure or when your <nobr><a class="iAs" style="border-bottom:darkgreen 1px solid;text-decoration:underline;color:darkgreen;background-color:transparent;" href="http://itxt.vibrantmedia.com/al.asp?ipid=7&cc=us&cf=1&ai=17281655&di=163935&ts=20040201070157" target="_blank" oncontextmenu="return false;" onmouseover="kwE(event,163935);" onmouseout="kwL(event);" onmousemove="kwM(163935);">computer</nobr> crashes.

If i was you i would boot from the xp cd then id remove the current partition and create a 20 gig partition for the operating system (or however much you want to give it i always use 20 gig) then id make another partiton with the remaining 100 gig this way you can format your operating system and still have all your setups videos mp3's films and etc on the 100 gig partition thats the way that i used to do it back in the day when all i had was a 120 gig hard drive!

Yeah, right, I found the problem. Seems that this brand of hdd has two sets of jumper settings. One set has master slave and cable select the second has the same however the use of the drive is capped at 32 gig. I have no idea who would want to use this "feature". i guess this serves me right for not reading the instructions carefully enough. cheers for the help anyway Paul

Hi Your bios would have then detected it as 32G, which is only fine if you have an old bios that is limited to 32G maximum capacity. I suspect that if you had used the manufactures setup utility it might have warned you that it was jumpered at 32G Glad you have it sorted though.