130gb hd limit, upto date win2000 and bios (should have solve it but did not)

[qusac]

I know win2000 had a limit of 130gb for its HD's till one of the service packs (i think i read 4) but my windows install is up to date (nothing in windows update). my bios reports the correct size (250gb) and ive tried using partition magic to format it but that also shows 130gb.
My plan is to remove my old hd and clean install win2000 but i would like to copy all the data to the new hd first. i would also have prefered to have a single partition on the new drive if posable.
any advise on how to achive this would be v. helpful. and i dont care if i need to use a bodge.
Nicholas Costa

(p.s. not worth its own post but i got an invisable icon on my systray only showing my ip address id like to know what it is. iv used 4 difrent security tools but have nothing.)

[DMR]

Support for drives/partitions greater than 137G did not appear until Service Pack 3, but even with SP3 (or 4) installed, there's still a Registry hack involved.

See the following Microsoft Knowledgebase article for the whole story:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098

[kc0arf]

Hello,

You might wish to re-think having a partition that large. Imagine all the things you could loose if something goes wrong on it. Plus, try to back that size of media onto something else.

Unless you are digitizing video, or have a large set of projects that consume huge amounts of data, I would suggest you partition it down into more managable sizes, to help protect your data. Remember that partitioning will *not* protect you from a hardware crash of the drive, but it will allow you to format a troublesome partition without disturbing the other volumes.

Christian

[jwenting]

if something goes wrong you're likely to loose the hardware so having multiple partitions will do you no good :)

I agree it's more prudent to have several smaller disks, but 100GB or so isn't excessive for today's overly large applications (which seem to have often been designed to use as much diskspace and CPU as possible in order to further hardware sales).

[qusac]

Thanks for the help guys.the registory hack did not work for the old install so i made a 100gb partition and installed clean on that, then hack than worked fine.
i still only see 230gb (on a 250 drive) but i can live with that as my old drive was 40gb.
Thanks again for the help.
Nick

[DMR]

Glad you finally got it to work. :)

The difference in GBs that you're seeing is mostly due to the fact that Windows and drive manufacturers use two different number/counting systems; binary and decimal. This results in the real, usable size of the drive being some percentage less than the size of the drive as advertized by the manufacturers. Because the difference is percentage-based, the actual difference in the amount of reported disk space can get quite sizable when you start working with multi-GB drives (over 17G for a 250G drive).

It's a bit confusing if you're only used to using our normal (decimal) counting system. but a bit more of an explanation can be found here:

http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm