Hi, everyone! I'm having a problem with a new hard drive I just bought. It is a Western Digital 160 GB SATA/150 drive that I got OEM. When I installed Windows, I created a primary partition on it, but found later that about 20 GB is missing. I went into Partition Magic and saw that this space was unused. When I tried to expand the existing primary partition or make a new one, it always gives me errors--specifically, error 49 (write error). I also tried diskpart and Windows Computer Management to fix the problem, but they all encountered errors as well. I am SURE that this is not a "math problem" where 160 GB is really about 150 GB or whatnot. Does anyone have any ideas?

Make sure that you are running SP2 and not SP1. SP1 has issues with HD 160gig+, it will not recognize some of the space. Try that and see what happens You can be amused by the simplest of things. The smartest people in the world, over-look the smallest objects. War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

Yes, that worked! Well, first, SP2 crashed my system to an unbootable state because of Roxio GoBack 2000, but after fixing that (i.e. reinstalling Windows), it worked fine.