Hard drive question

[Nudrummer]

I recently upgraded to a 250gb hard drive from a 40gb hard drive ,upon installing i set the new one as a master the old as a slave. I went into bios to make sure both were working,and they were,however the new drive instead of reading at 250gb it read as only 139gb...i was just wondering why??? and what can i do to get the space i paid for??? or does it matter??? please note that i havent formatted this drive yet,or installed any operating system on it...perhaps this is the prob?

The drive is a, Western Digital/Caviar SE/250gb/7200rpm/8mb/ata-100/eide/oem

My full computer specs are below:

(1) KM133A Chipset Socket A MATX Motherboard Base System with Audio
(1) AMD Athlon Processor 1.4 GHz
(1) 512mb PC133 SDRAM (2-256MB DIMM)
(1) 40GB Ultra ATA (5400rpm) Hard Drive
(1) 16x (max) Toshiba DVD-ROM Drive
(1) 40x (max) Sony CDRW Drive

 

[JinkX]

make sure that the hd is 250 gb first .( look at the label on it ) not the one on the carton !
then try formatting it ..
if its still the same .. try to go and kick the selers *** !

 

[uzi9mm]

you need a BIOS update most likely.. that or you need to change settings within your BIOS that are related to your large hard disk.

 

[talldude123]

http://techist.com/showthread.php?threadid=79821

 

[Nudrummer]

Ok guys thanks but now i have a new problem...Like i said,The drive read in my bios,and it was set as my master drive and my old one as my slave...when i went through the steps to install windows xp on it,both drives showed up and windows asked me which partition i would like to use to install windows,i chose the large drive,although it didnt have a drive letter beside it,like my slave drive did which was C:...after chooseing my new drive to install windows on,windows then began formatting the drive, it got to 100% and then a screen popped up saying windows cannot formatt this drive,there may be a problem with it or the drive is not working..well after this happened bios no longer read the drive and even tho i tried many times to get it to auto detect the drive once again it never would,now the drive makes a clicking noise,but its not constant,it will click for like a second then stop, then do it again,as if its trying to read and work but with no luck...Did i do something wrong and ruin the drive, or could my problem be something else????

also i did try afterwards to set my new drive as a slave and my old one as master,but it basically did the same thing bios wouldnt read the new drive at all,and it still clicked????