500gb HD detected as 127gb

[weewun]

wel my friend just built himself a new quad core machine, but foe some reason the 500gb hard disk that he bought with it is only being detected as a 127gb HD. the HD is a 500gb samsung HD501LJ, on a gigabyte mobo. he bought the upgrade version of ista, and it is detected as 127 by both XP and vista. he have formatted it and it is still detected as a 127!
what could be causeing this / how do i fix it?
cheers

 

[murdocsvan]

re-partition it. its probably partitioned incorrectly.

 

[Apokalipse]

Install Service Pack 2 for XP, delete the partition in diskmgmt.msc, then reformat it with the full capacity.

Or you can use diskmgmt.msc in Vista, as it already supports the full capacity of the drives.

But you'll still need SP2 for XP.

 

[weewun]

thanks folks that sorted it cheers