EggXpert

I bought a 500gb harddrive  an can not figure out how to get the SATA drivers on it

because i donot own a floppy disk, i have the drive but cant find a floppy any where,

so windows only picks up 131gb. what do i do.

I am running XP Pro, I have never had a SATA until now, My system is brand new except for os. when you install

XP At the very begining it says pressF6 to install sata/raid, thats where i get stuck. I tried the Memory stick thing as well.

The drivers i am refering to are the Mobo drivers for XP to read the hard drive as 500gb in stead of 131gb there again thats where i get stuck.

What does the bios say when you look at the drive in there? You need to get an sp1 or later ver of XP as I think that fixed the sata issue.

The other thing you can do is is use nlite and build an xp install disc with all the service packs and the drivers you need already loaded. I had to do that as well when I tried to setup raid.

Xp is pretty useless right now you should move up to either vista or win 7 then you wouldn't have any of these issues.

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The BOIS reads 500gb, Ive installed SP3, but since i couldnt get the Sata drivers installed in setup I had to set it as Native IDE instead of Raid/ACHI.

I am soon to upgrade to Vista ultimate. I'll try the Nlite thanks.

You need a floppy drive (internal or external) to intall RAID driver for MOBO with WIN XP, it will only look at the "A" drive for this file.

Better solution is to upgrade OS.

joshuaje07:

The BOIS reads 500gb, Ive installed SP3, but since i couldnt get the Sata drivers installed in setup I had to set it as Native IDE instead of Raid/ACHI.

I am soon to upgrade to Vista ultimate. I'll try the Nlite thanks.

Let's give you some easier ways to do this, if you'd like.  Since updating XP, you can now work with larger drives / partitions.  Native IDE mode is fine.

You can use partitioning software to extend this partition across the entire drive.  Or, if your OS is on this drive right now, I would recommend shrinking (or enlarging) the partition to a size that allows for your OS and programs (i.e. my XP install uses 10GB of a 40GB partition), then create a second for the rest of the drive.

Or a super simple option (if you really only want the space) is to go to Disk Management (right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management) and create a partition for the unused space on the drive and format.