Windows not recognizing hard drive

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Girevik

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Ok, have had an absoloute litinay of problems with trying to recover from an issue on my PC, and the latest is that evidently my hard drive died. I bought a new hard drive and installed Windows on a smaller one just so I can get it booted up. I have the new drive installed in my computer (a 500GB WD), and it shows up just fine in the bios and in device manager. When I open Windows Exploerer, though, it doesn't show up. When I go into "Computer Management" I see a 2nd drive but it says the max size is 128GB. Is this a limitation on my hardware? It's an older computer, but I do have a 250GB exteranl drive it recognizes.

Does anyone have any sggestions on my latest mess?
 
XP pre service pack 1 wont recognize anything larger than 120 GB so you will need to install SP2 to see it in your "My Computer"
 
Sorry, it's XP Pro.

What really stinks is that Windows didn't install a NIC driver I can use and I'm having trouble finding the right one so I can't even download SP2. I guess I'll see if I can get it on my exteran drive or a usb drive and see if I can install it that way.

Thanks for the tips.
 
I'm not sure exactly. It's a Dell 4550, but I've tried the drivers from the site and for some reason they don't seem to work for me.

I had another thought in regards to the disk size thing. If I can't get my restore to work on the new HD, I'll have to install Windows onto it and start from scratch. If I do that on a drive that's too large for Windows to recognize, will that cause a problem?
 
I'm not sure exactly. It's a Dell 4550, but I've tried the drivers from the site and for some reason they don't seem to work for me.

I had another thought in regards to the disk size thing. If I can't get my restore to work on the new HD, I'll have to install Windows onto it and start from scratch. If I do that on a drive that's too large for Windows to recognize, will that cause a problem?

You said in your original post that you had already done a fresh install of XP on a smaller drive..

How old is your XP CD? is it.. I'm guessing, pre SP1? (2000) sounds like it. you need 2002 edition or later, that will have SP2 already installed, and your larger drive will be recognized.

But if you download SP3 and install that using your older version of XP. that should work too.. but a newer installation CD will have more updated drivers for your system.
 
Hampton is right. XP pre-sp2 will not recognize any hard drive larger than 137GB. No matter if it is in a external enclosure or not. You will need SP2 to get it recognized.
 
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