I can't seem to find any answers for this one; I have just installed a 200GB drive and a fresh install of XP Pro but the drive is only recognized as 127GB. When I was using Maxtor's Maxblast to install the drive it said to install XP and then install Maxblast windows version and format the drive to it's full capacity. Well, after windows is installed Maxblast SAYS the drive is the windows drive and it cant be formatted to capacity  :-?

I installed XP Pro and SP2 but still can't recognize my 200GB drive.Probably a motherboard limitation.  Do you know for a fact that your motherboard supports >128GB hard drives?  Not sure about the Windows side of THINGS - is there a maximum partition size too?  You may need to partition it so that no single partition is larger than 128GB.

That's a good idea anyway - it's safer not to have all your files on one partition.The motherboard question is a good one...I think that board is about 5 years old. It's my kid's pc, which is pretty good for a kid. I've never used partitions so to be honest I'm not sure how to do that. I'm sure Maxblast can do that, but do I have to re-install windows?It is possible to shrink FAT-based partitions using FIPS (see the software FAQ - follow the LINK in my signature), provided you have defragged first.  For NTFS filesytems, you probably would need a commercial tool.

Partitioning on Windows systems is usually done via FDISK.  You might want to Google for a beginner's guide?

Re the possible motherboard limitation; there's a chance that the motherboard vendor has released a BIOS upgrade overcoming this limitation.  You'd need to check their website.Doh! I feel a bit sheepish...Maxblast has a "format unallocated diskspace" utility that did the job by creating a SECOND volume of 60-plus GB  Great!  And is that now showing up as an extra drive, in Windows Explorer?