I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about hardware but this one has me stumped.

I picked up a dual Athlon MB with two 1900+ chips from a buddy at work.  I stuck it all together yesterday and today started installing XP Pro.  Well the first install went fine,  BIOS sees all 250GB of disk and when Windows went to install it saw the whole drive.

Well then things went to hell.  Long story short,  a bad stick of RAM was killing me.

New RAM,  runs fine.  I stick the CDROM in and boot er' up.  BIOS sees 250GB but the Windows setup routine only sees 131GB.  I reboot a few times,  delete the partition about five times and recreate it.  It still only sees  131 GB.

I think, what the hell, maybe yesterday that's all it saw too, and I just missed it.  When it gets into windows it'll see the whole thing.  Well, it did,  now Windows sees the whole thing, but there is now a 131GB partition on the  drive and the rest is empty.

What gives?  Why would the setup only see 131 GB when I deleted the partition several times?  Any ideas? I've never seen this before and am sort of at a loss to explain it.

Known issue SP1 or 2 fixes it.  Sucks for fresh installs.  You can do a few things to correct for fresh installs.

BTW Google is your friend in this case.

nobody needs 200 gigs anyway...........


BAN BIG HARD DRIVES!!  

Quoted: Known issue SP1 or 2 fixes it.  Sucks for fresh installs.  You can do a few things to correct for fresh installs. BTW Google is your friend in this case.

slipstream sp2

Quoted: Quoted: Known issue SP1 or 2 fixes it.  Sucks for fresh installs.  You can do a few things to correct for fresh installs. BTW Google is your friend in this case. slipstream sp2

Was going to reccomend, but don't know how savy user is.

Quoted: Known issue SP1 or 2 fixes it.  Sucks for fresh installs.  You can do a few things to correct for fresh installs. BTW Google is your friend in this case.

Yep...

For a clean install it is possible to make an install CD with SP1 or SP2 integrated into it. It takes some technical know how but can be done.

There my be software tools that came with the drive that will help.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Known issue SP1 or 2 fixes it.  Sucks for fresh installs.  You can do a few things to correct for fresh installs. BTW Google is your friend in this case. slipstream sp2 Was going to reccomend, but don't know how savy user is.

windoze tech topics walks you through it... several how-tos posted on that internet thingy...

eta

Thanks guys, I finally found it about the time I checked the thread.   I jumped the gun on this one,  I looked the first time and must have missed it.  

I'm in the process of slipstreaming the XP2 now.  Very cool, I didn't know you could slipstrip into existing CD installs.

Very handy.

CBR

Quoted: nobody needs 200 gigs anyway........... BAN BIG HARD DRIVES!!

I remember when IBM said that about the 5meg drives on their IBM-PC. They also said that no one would need 128K of RAM.

Then again, 300baud Acoustic Couplers cost $300 back then too, while 2400bps modems (highest speed available) where about $2000.