Computer Experts - Need Help!
 

My laptop is an older HP with an AMD 1.45 gigahertz processor, and a gig of RAM. I bought a new hard drive for it because the old one is small (40 GB) and, well, old (as you know, it's not IF they will fail, it's WHEN they will fail). At any rate, I bought a Western Digital 250 GB and installed it yesterday, doing a clean install of XP Pro. Everything went fine, until I noticed that the hard drive was only showing up with 137 GB, both in the bios and "Properties" for that drive. :confused: The bios would not let me make any changes to the hard drive settings. It's permanently set to "Auto". I did flash a newer revision bios, but it had no effect on the hard drive setting options.

After doing all Windows updates, including Service Pack 3, the Drive Manager in the Admin console now showed all 250 GB, with anything over the 137 GB showing up as "Unallocated Space". I downloaded a program that allowed me to move that line and use all 250 GB of space. Great! I was happy. :)

Forward on to later that evening when I sat down with my laptop and old hard drive installed in a USB housing and started updating software and moving docs over to the new drive. Had to re-boot the computer at one point, and when I did, it got stuck after the bios loaded. Nothing but black screen with a blinking cursor. I re-installed the old hard drive to make sure I hadn't "bricked" my bios, and it came up fine.

Spent a good bit of time checking things out and found the "\windows\system32\config\system" file was missing/corrupted and I couldn't repair it. Ended up formatting the new drive and started all over again. Now it's all re-loaded and what's odd is that this time the bios still says the drive is 137 GB, but Windows says it's 250 GB. That's great, but I don't know if the discrepancy between the bios and the actual drive is going to cause another crash or if I'm good to go.

What do you guys think? Am I good, or do I need to partition the drive into two smaller drives? I'd rather not partition if I don't have to, but will if I'm at risk for another problem.

Update: Ended up formatting the hard drive and starting over. Found out that even though Windows could see the entire hard drive, my bios is only capable of addressing 137 GB and using a single drive larger than that will cause problems, so I partitioned the drive into two smaller drives and all seems to be well so far.

I have always partitioned my drives. I put all my documents, pictures etc on the second partition and windows and all the programs on the C drive. If (when) I have to start fresh I just need to format the C drive and not worry about backing anything up.

Do this as well. Makes backing up very easy as well.

If you want to get around 137 GB, you would probably need to update your bios for you PC. 137 GB of HD space was the limit on HD size for a while. (Windows XP pre Service Pack 2 era) The OS can probably recognize that is is larger, but this may cause issues. Update the Bios.

Good idea. Ideally, I'd like to make the OS partition smaller and the document partition larger, but I don't know if that will wreak havoc with my bios.

David,

Get a copy of partition magic and it will do all you are talking about and easily.