500gb or 137gb? Hastles with XP

[randeec]

I recently bought a new AMD Dualcore 6400 barebones system.
Not realizing the motherboard it came with only had one IDE channel, I wound up purchasing a 500gb SATA drive to replace the 100 & 120gb drives I previously had.

The issue is installing Windows XP on the 500 SATA and using it as a primary boot drive.
I had it running in a matter of minutes, but using only 131 GB of the drive capacity,
I read somewhere about slipstreaming the drive with the raid drivers at XP's initial setup.
That is a whole nother story in itself, but was done.
BIOS and XP that is installed on the 120gb drive read the drive as a 500 GB drive.
The WD LifeData tools that the drive came with, easily allows me to partition and format the drive into five 100gb drives. But upon installing XP, it only comes up as a 131gb drive and says it needs to be formatted.
Then I read I need to make the disk active in XP's DiskManagement.
DiskManagement, again allowed me to re-partition the drive, but only into 4 partitions, (one 100 and three 125's (465gb available)) reformat the drive and make it "active".
Then to install XP on the first partition XP setup shows the drive as a single 131gb drive again (even though it's partitioned into smaller drives) and needs to be formatted.

What the hell gives? is XP setup unable to see a partitioned drive bigger than 137gb or is there a step I'm missing?

[caperjack]

What the hell gives? is XP setup unable to see a partitioned drive bigger than 137gb or is there a step I'm missing?

exactly ,use the disk utility from the hdd makers website,LIKE : maxtor= maxblast , seagate = seatools and so on

[compdoc]

I recently bought a new AMD Dualcore 6400 barebones system.
Not realizing the motherboard it came with only had one IDE channel, I wound up purchasing a 500gb SATA drive to replace the 100 & 120gb drives I previously had.

The issue is installing Windows XP on the 500 SATA and using it as a primary boot drive.
I had it running in a matter of minutes, but using only 131 GB of the drive capacity,
I read somewhere about slipstreaming the drive with the raid drivers at XP's initial setup.
That is a whole nother story in itself, but was done.
BIOS and XP that is installed on the 120gb drive read the drive as a 500 GB drive.
The WD LifeData tools that the drive came with, easily allows me to partition and format the drive into five 100gb drives. But upon installing XP, it only comes up as a 131gb drive and says it needs to be formatted.
Then I read I need to make the disk active in XP's DiskManagement.
DiskManagement, again allowed me to re-partition the drive, but only into 4 partitions, (one 100 and three 125's (465gb available)) reformat the drive and make it "active".
Then to install XP on the first partition XP setup shows the drive as a single 131gb drive again (even though it's partitioned into smaller drives) and needs to be formatted.

What the hell gives? is XP setup unable to see a partitioned drive bigger than 137gb or is there a step I'm missing?

actually Windows XP SP1 and higher dose support drives larger than 137GB you should check your drives documentation to make sure you have the correct jumper configuration some drives will allow you to set them to 137GB for OSs that do not support drives larger than 137GB

[forumdude123]

Check to make sure you have xp sp2 AND that your bios supports drives larger than 137gb, as this is a common problem in many machines.

[bobbyraw]

that might be the problem the bios setting. what does the bios recognized the drive as. you may have to turn on large support in the bios. and as for the boot order you have to set that in the bios also the bios will read the IDE as the first boot. (had the same issue with my asus board with one ide channel) so move the sata to the to of the boot order.