After a lightning storm ate my old system drive (a WD 30GB on its last legs), I decided it was time to upgrade. I did the research and determined that my motherboard had SATA II capability. Such a deal, I thought!
So here I am with a brand new WD drive. The BIOS recognizes it. The Windows XP CD recognizes it to a point – it only sees about 137 GB of the drive itself. This would apparently be because my CD is freakin’ ancient, as determined by the number of updates required by the computer.
The good: I got XP Pro running on the drive smooth as glass. Holy crap is SATA 2 fast.
The bad: I’m using less than half of my beautiful drive.
I tried originally partitioning it with the WD utilities that came with the drive, but while they seemed cognizant that the drive was larger than 137 GB they refused to allow me to partition the drive properly. I could have one 137 GB partition or multiple smaller partitions, but it would not let me use more than 137 GB total space on the drive.
To my understanding, I should be able to partition the unpartitioned portion (say that three times fast!) of the drive now that I’m upgraded to SP3. How should I go about doing this? I suppose if all else fails I can use another drive for my boot partition, update that to SP3, and repartition from there, but is that really necessary?
XP had no problem partitioning my 250 Gig drive, on the other hand it wasn’t SATA.
Try downloading GParted and repartitioning with that - Don’t format the partitions though, unless it has NTFS available. Leave the partitions unformatted and let XP do that.
Be aware that it may screw up your current XP installation.
Prior to SP1, Windows XP only supported 28-bit LBA (logical block addressing). Under LBA, blocks (chunks of 512 bytes) on a hard drive are numbered sequentially in a linear (flat) addressing scheme. This gives you a maximum of 268,435,456 addressable blocks, which at 512 bytes per block limits you to 137,438,953,472 bytes. This works out to 137.4 GB, or exactly 128 GiB. Updating to SP1 or greater will add support for 48-bit LBA, which ups the ante to something like 144 PB – almost 150,000x larger than the largest consumer HDDs available today.
If you update to SP1, 2 or 3, you might be able to use a tool like Partition Magic or Norton Ghost to resize the partition and the file system to fill the rest of the drive. Otherwise, your best option is download SP3, and slipstream it into your Windows install CD so that you have a Windows XP SP3 install disk. This will let you install Windows XP from scratch using the entire hard drive from the beginning.
Unfortunately you need SP2 to be able to address drives larger than 128GB. I ran into the same problem when I got my first 250GB drive, and installing SP2 solved the problem quite handily.
However, I had to create my own SP2 slipstream CD in order to do it, because I was caught in a Catch-22: I couldn’t use the full capacity of the drive until I had upgraded to SP2, but in order to upgrade to SP2 I had to have the drive already formatted and XP already installed. So I found instructions on how to create an SP2 slipstream disk and went that route. Worked great, but it was a bit of work.
Use Norton Ghost, or some other similar full-drive backup applications to create an image of your drive as it is right now, reformat to your desired partition size(s), and reinstall from your new slipstreamed CD.
Upgrade now and simply create a new partition with the newly opened up space and use it for whatever. If need be you can use something like Partition Magic to either join or resize your existing partitions.
Slipstreaming. Glory be, this was going to be my next question.
See, the computer is a homebrew – an old AMD Athlon-I-think 3200 on an ASUS A8N-VM board (a mighty fine board in fact, but it would be better if ASUS’s website didn’t smoke the donkey) with (crappy) onboard sound. Whenever I think to myself “I should get a real live soundcard” I look at my pathetic old speakers and the cost of a decent soundcard and I go and spend my $200 on something else. That, and I use a particularly ornery wireless USB network adapter, so I have to install the software for that while XP tries to figure out what it is. I can’t update to a version of XP that can figure it out without my drivers because I can’t get the whole rig closer to the cable modem without backstrain, and I can’t get the sound to run at all until SP2 and a hard-to-find driver. Configuring a CD with all this would be bliss.
The drive came with some fairly rudimentary imaging software, it seems, or at least enough to make a copy of my OS settings. I surely want more than one partition on this drive – as fast as SATA is I want to put my games on it now, and I’ve learned from painful experience to never put anything I love on my system partition…
The gparted live CD will definitely do what the OP wants - I used it recently on my sister’s machine which - for some reason I don’t fully understand - I originally set up as dual-boot with a tiny NTFS partition containing XP and a huge EXT3 partition containing Ubuntu.
Windows got by far the most use and quickly started complaining about disk space - with the gparted live CD, it was dead simple to shrink one partition and grow the other, all without affecting the file contents of the partitions.
Now that the OP’s system is updated to a version of XP that supports the whole drive, there should be no problem with resizing the partition to take up more, or all of the space.
After that, I’d suggest making a drive image of the whole thing (and using that as a future reinstall solution), rather than trying to create a slipstreamed installer.