Help with hard drives.
 

Well. I recently went to the store, and bought all the components to make a really, really nice computer. Its got lots of RAM, a good video card, etc., etc.

I just have one problem. I'm using Windows 2000 Professional edition, and it seems that it just can't recognize the all of my hard drive (its a 300 gigabyte Maxtor SATA) I've tried and I've tried, but whatever I do, it only recognizes a drive with 125 gigs of storage available. Is this the maximum sized disk that Windows 2000 will recognize, or what? I paid for 300 gigabytes... please help me use them...

Re: Help with hard drives.
 

If you have a second drive handy, install windows on that drive and then run Widows update and get SP3, this may give you the updates necessary to address 300 gigs.

Re: Help with hard drives.
 

Gah! You know, reading the website helps... alot...

Anyways, it turns out that I had to boot from the disk that came with the Hard Drive... the one I didn't see... :doh:

Right now its formatting about 290 gigs of hard drive... this is going to take a while...

Thatnks for the help, anyways...

Re: Help with hard drives.
 

Alright, I may have spoken too soon...

Windows recognizes the 290 some-odd gigs of hard drive avalible, and formats it all before installing. But then, when I resatrt the computer and it asks me to select a partition to install Windows 2000 on, it comes up with four: two formatted partitions of sizes 80 GB and 20 GB, and two unformatted partitions of 138 GB and 850 GB (yes, gigabytes).

I know this can't be right. So I just select the biggest partition it will let me install into, and iy copies some files, and then tells me to restart my computer. I press enter, and it re-boots. But here I have another problem: Windows will either try installing itself again (CD boot), or not recognize any files at all, and starts all over again.

I think I'm screwed now. Any advice?

Re: Help with hard drives.
 

Maybe you could try connecting it through a external case by USB. Doesn't Microsoft have support?

Re: Help with hard drives.
 

try installing all over again, but this time when your comp restarts to finish the install, pay attention and before you allow you comp to fully reboot, go into your bios and make sure that you CD drive is not the first boot device, to prevent your comp from trying to reboot from the install didk again.
as for the partition that you did not say you created yourself I am not sure how they could have been created by default. only thing i can think of is if you bought the drive used myabe the partitions are left over. But you didn say you bought it at a store, are you sure it wasn't a return. just a possibility.