160gb = 130gb!?

Just installed my mate's 160gb HD. When it came to partitioning it the windows setup utility could only see 130gb. I know you can lose a couple but 30gb seems a bit steep. It's the original windows xp pro setup disk I was using. Any ideas?

Yeah, by my reckoning, a 160Gb hard drive should appear as 149Gb, not 130!

Yeah. But what does Windows itself actually read the disk as? You might just find that the setup isnt that accurate.

It's only seeing 137Gb which when formatted ~130Gb.
You need to either get a utility from the HD mfrs site or there should be a Windows patch for it. Possibly a BIOS update too.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;303013

yep, this is a 48bit lba issue. the old disk addressing method (32bit lba, i think) has a maximum of 130ish gig per disk. your bios and os need to support 48bit lba. this may need both a bios flash, and windows xp sp1 / windows 2000 sp4 / windows server 2003 installed (with a registry change to enable 48bit lba). oses that started with the right service packs (as opposed to pre-sp1 xp then installing sp1 afterwards) have the os half enabled by default. linux kernels around the 2.4.20ish region support 48bit lba

the alternative (if there's no bios update, there may not be on old boards) is a ten quid plug-in pci ide card.

If you have a motherboard that supports 48-bit LBA, you'll need Windows 2000 SP3+ / Windows XP SP1+, and this registry setting that enables 48-bit access (Save Target As, make sure it ends in .reg).

sp3? thought it was sp4. my bad

I was actually reading up on it a few weeks ago for a colleague at work.
For Windows 2000, it's KB article Q305098, and for XP, it's Q303013.

my only machine with a big hard disk runs server 2003 (native 48biit lba) on a highpoint rocketraid (48bit lba bios applied), so i've not paid much attention

Thanks for the replies guys, most helpful :)