Hello. Last year I bought a 160 gb WD ide drive and installed as a slave on my computer which was running windows ME, only to be disappointed to find out that ME doesn't support drives that big so I had to format it at 127 GB. So that's what I did. Recently I got a new dell which of course is running XP and I intalled the drive into that as a second drive (which was a story in itself, I got some education about the new sata connectors and ide cards). Well the plan was to transfer all the data over to the new primary drive (160 gb sata) and reformat the old one at full capacity, but when I go format it in XP there is only one option for capacity - 127 gb. So I stopped, and I haven't actually tried it yet. Any thought on how I can get full capacity out of my old drive?

Thanks for your help, computer gurus.

Chris

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, and select Disk Management. You will most likely see your secondary disk listed as Disk 1. You should also see two different partitions listed for this disk: one with a size of 127GB and one listed as unpartitioned space. Right-click the 127GB partition and select "Delete Partition" or "Delete Logical Drive" (whichever is the one listed). After you delete that partition, you should see 200GB of unpartitioned space. You can right-click the unpartitioned space and format it.

Let me know if you have any problems with these steps.

That did it. Thanks Chris.

I also have a new 160GB drive running as my primary but can only see 127GB.
Can I do the same thing with a drive that already has files installed or do I risk loosing all my data?