You add a brand new hard drive to your new system. You’re all happy of all the new space but the operating system tells you that there’s only somewhere between 127 GB to 137 GB available even though it’s much larger. You’re probably thinking that you got a defective drive or someone’s trying to rip you off. Take a few deep breaths and read on. This limitation affects both Windows and Mac based systems. An article provided by Seagate Technology, a leading manufacturer of disk based storage solutions, provides an explanation and details as to how this issue can be overcome. A link to the article is below:

Seagate Article

Make special note of where it says “IMPORTANT: Always Back Up First”

OK, so those of you with Windows XP without a Service Pack on your CD are probably a bit upset at this point that you have no option to make your hard drive one large partition after reading the article. You actually can do it but it’s not guaranteed. You can always try a third party tool to resize the partition. I personally like GParted, which allows you to resize the partition. And best of all it’s FREE. A link to the website is below:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Once again…..“IMPORTANT: Always Back Up First”

If it doesn’t work or fails miserably, I’d suggest ‘slipstreaming’ Windows XP Service Pack 3 (or SP1 at the very least) into your Windows XP CD. A simple utility that helps you accomplish this is nlite. Once again, it’s FREE.

http://www.nliteos.com/

* OK, but my drive is only detecting as 32GB even though it’s supposed to be bigger than that.

You probably pulled this drive out of an old system built prior to when Bill Clinton was President of the United States and dealing with a small little impeachment case due to his testimony regarding a Paula Jones or for some of you less politically inclined; it’s when the Sega Dreamcast started selling in Japan. Basically, the drive has been limited so that it works in older computers. Each hard drive has different jumper settings to resolve the issue but if you look on the label there should be a very small picture as to how to remove the limit on the drive. It’s just a matter of removing the jumper. Once again, Seagate has an article on how it’s done with their drives:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=32_GB_-_33.8_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=dacb5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD