Who manufactures the 250 gig dirve? If it is a western digital drive you an use their priprietary software to get it to recognize the full drive size but you will have to run it as a slave initially. the bad news it that you will have to re-install XP. Partition magic might work but the drive has a set partition which was part of the install originally set up by xp. Addtionally, you can use a copy of 98se floppy boot disk to run fdisk and dos foamat the drive and then re-intialize with with a signle dos partition and have xp setup recognize the full dirve space. This has happened to me on more than on occasion. Once the partition size is set you are kinda stuck with removing the existing partition and then redefining it and then reinstalling windows xp.