Legit Reviews

I ordered a Seagate 250GB HDD and it is telling me its only 130GB. I was just wondering IF its possible that it has 2 partitions on it and I can't see the other one for some reason??? IF so how can I find out for sure. I got it from NewEgg and they don't usually mess up like this, Also I have not ever seen a SATA2 HDD thats only 130 GB.

What operating system? Also is it formatted correctly?

make sure it's formatted NFTS.

If its a 2nd drive I'd double check the part number with seagate and also look at the drive via partitioning software (something like GParted Live) that will let you see the hole raw drive.

If you installed windows strait to the drive it will cut it to 130, you will have to go into the windows drive manager (or the gparted live) to format the other part of it.

Some OS need support for larger drives
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

also check if the drive don't have any jumpers that make it show smaller size
old IBM HD use to have that

I opened it , installed it in my system as the lone HDD and booted from disk to load windows. When the setup screen came up it asked me how I wanted the drive formated. It showed me only 130 GB which I formated to NTFS.

Make sure "LBA" is enabled in the bios!

I will check it out.

Where can I find the " LBA " in BIOS. In my BIOS under the standard BIOS settings it said my SATA drive was 250GB but under my computer in windows it shows 127.

Merlin wrote:Where can I find the " LBA " in BIOS. In my BIOS under the standard BIOS settings it said my SATA drive was 250GB but under my computer in windows it shows 127.

You should be able to press enter when you have the HDD selected in the bios, or it can be in a separate "Storage options" section below.

Merlin by chance do you not have SP2 Installed? If you don't windows cannot recognize the full capacity of the drive

Ok so here is where I am now. I have installed ALL the updates to my OS that microsoft says I need. I followed the link posted earlier to a support page and did what it said. Still sys its a 127 GB HDD. I looked in BIOS and this is what I found.
Under the standard CMOS settings it lists all the drives I have, I selected this drive and it brought up a page that had only two settings I could change

Extended IDE drive
none
Auto
Access Mode
Auto
Large
both of these are set to auto. I tried setting the access mode to large but got a hdd read error and the system would not boot.

I have not been able to find anywhere else in my BIOS that refers to anything like LGA " logical block addressing"

All of this brings up another couple of questions......IF you have to have SP2 for windows to recognize a drive larger than 137 GB, will windows recognize the full capacity of the drive after SP2 is added to a non-SP2 copy of windows? Considering that when the drive was initially formated all that was partitioned was the 137 that windows said was there??
Secondly wouldnt the drive by default now have to have 2 partitions, the one I set up at install and another set up after windows "learns" how large the drive is?
Finally if the answer to both of the above is yes then how is one expected to get around a dual partition drive on an OEM purchased HDD?? Since there is no software sent with OEM HDDs

The limit of LBA is 137GB

so if you see 127GB it could be something else.
again for all details regarding LBA read the following
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

I have a seagate 300g as my main drive, when I installed windows it cut the drive down to 127g, I then had to go back and partition and format the other half of the drive leaving me with a second 151g partition.

Have you tried the to look at the drive with some drive partition software, the drive tools from seagate, or even the drive manager in windows?

start>control panel>admin tools>computer management: storage ->Disk management

Look at disk 0 in the low right window, there will be a block marked as drive c and then to the right of that there will be another block, that would be the unpartitioned space. right click on it and format it. DONT SHUT THE MACHINE OFF TILL ITS DONE!

Merlin wrote: Finally if the answer to both of the above is yes then how is one expected to get around a dual partition drive on an OEM purchased HDD?? Since there is no software sent with OEM HDDs

Even with me seagate drive I got retail, the CD that is used to set up the drive for a windows install warns you and then forces the drive to the 137 size due to the fact widows will force it any way.

Now if you want the whole 250 as the drive C then you will have to get a drive partition software like Gparted Live to resize the C partition to the full 250 AFTER windows is installed.

I agree with the above post.
Maybe you can screen shot your Disk Mangment console so we can take a look

Till SP2 win XP had an aprox.130Gb limit for an partition. If you don't have SP2 installed you should make more partitions

LE: to create partitions use partition magic.