Last week I had a hard drive failure which prompted me to build a new machine. Well, last night I finished the box and had her fire up right away. The computer runs smooth and fast (very fast) but I noticed a few things were off.
I have in stalled 4 GB of RAM however Windows only reports 2.75 GB
I have one Ultra ATA hard drive that is 160 GB, but Windows only reports 127 GB
I have one SATA2 hard drive that is 500 GB, but Windows is only reporting 127 GB
Now, What I think I have is XP Pro on the 160 GB drive. The other drive is not yet formatted because I wanted to make sure Windows sees the whole thing before I do format it.
I am pretty sure that these are known issues, but I have searched, both here and elsewhere, but I can’t find an answer. I assume that I am phrasing my searches wrong. Can Dopers please help?
For the record:
-XP Pro is a 32 bit version even though I am now running a core 2 extreme processor
-The BIOS for the motherboard is up to date.
Regarding the HD issues…
What is the service pack for your installation of XP? If you have an old installation disk and this is a new system build, you might have visit Windows update. Also, you might find this informative.
Have you examined the disk via Disk Manager in Windows? And, if so, did you see any unallocated space?
If you look at the drive through your bios while booting-up, what does it see in terms of drive capacity? Regarding the RAM issues…
Need more info.
Tell us more about:[ul][]Mobo brand/model/bios[]Drive brand/model[]RAM brand/model/timings[]Processor details[/ul]
Firstly, the memory. XP, being a 32-bit OS, has issues with memory over 2 GB. Further, some of the memory may be reserved as shared gaphics memory. If you boot with a 64 bit Linux LiveCD, how much memory do you have? It’s possible too that this could be a motherboard issue. Does the manual say it will support 4 GB? Is this 4x 1GB or 2x 2GB?
Secondly, the HDDs. Let me guess: your CD is plain XP Pro? Not XP Pro SP2 This is an issue with the ATAPI driver: it’s not using 48 bit addressing. See this MS KB article. A better way is to slipstream SP2 into XP. You’ll need to reformat and reinstall.
The install CD of XP Pro that I have is an early one and there is no service pack on the disk. Among the first things I did once the computer got on the web was get SP2, I’m not that much of a risk taker to leave that be for too long.
I don’t think that this hardware is lacking in anyway that it should not be able to be configured as cutting edge as XP Pro can get.
My intention is for the 160gig drive to have the OS on it and software on the 500gig drive. The computer reads both drives as being 137GB. As I mentioned, there is SP2 on the computer and the EnableBigLba registry setting mentioned in the KB article is set to ‘1’.
As has been pointed out, drives over 128GB require Service Pack 2 to be installed in order to be formatted properly.
For RAM, I haven’t installed more than 2GB so far, so I don’t know about issues regarding that, but RAM consumption goes up the more startup programs you have installed, and that can be raised to a fairly significant amount if you have startup programs that eat lots of RAM. Cleanly installed and idle, XP eats about 180-200MB. Start piling on the startup apps and that can grow, especially if you have skinners and other such enhancements that by their very nature suck up memory. Prior to my hard drive dying last month, I had my desktop tarted up to the nines, and consumed about 750MB just after booting up. I haven’t reinstalled absolutely everything yet, but even so, I’m still eating up about 450MB idle. (A large chunk of that is consumed by several apps from the Stardock Object Desktop suite.)
It’s fairly easy to slipstream yourself a Windows XP SP2 boot CD and reinstall using that … or you could use PartitionMagic to resize the drives up to their full capacity, which would be less disruptive. Of course, that’s commercial software.
If you don’t mind reformatting your drives, and want to just reinstall using a Windows XP SP2 install CD, just google “slipstream XP sp2” to see how to do it. Basically you copy the contents of your XP CD onto your hard drive, then download SP2, then use a command-line switch to the SP2 executable to slipstream its contents into the XP contents, then burn that to a bootable CD.
Okay, the hard drives are as fixed as I am going to make them right now. I think now in hindsight, that I made the mistake of first starting up the computer with both hard drives in it.
I seem to have gotten confuse over which one was which. But I have now reformatted the 500GB drive and and the 160GB drive still only shows 127GB, but considering how I was planning on using it, that size is still fine.
Windows still reports 2…75 GB of RAM but the "View the status of my system hardware and software " check in Help and Support shows 4 GB.
