hard drive question

The bios update will be needed first,because it will detect and read the drive as full disk in configuration of the system as a whole,it does not see the drive as being split to be two drives

I see that you posted this in the XP section.

If you are running XP, do you have Service Pack 1 installed?
The original version of XP can only support drives up to 137GB.

If you are setting up the drive from DOS (a Windows boot floppy) the latest version of fdisk (for FAT32) is still limited to 137GB.

Now, does the motherboard only report 137GB?
Or, is it the utility you are using to set up the drive?

If the motherboard is NOT reporting the correct drive size, you have 2 options:

1. Download and use Seagate's drive utility.
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

(Remove any spaces from the pasted links)

2. Install a PCI IDE controller card. These cards have their own BIOS that should recognize your new hard drive.

If it is fdisk or Windows that does not see the full size of the drive, you need to have:
SP1 for XP,
SP3 for W2K
Windows NT - Me do NOT support drives larger than 137GB.

As to partitioning, the motherboard or utility needs to see the full capacity of the drive before you can partition and use the full capacity of the drive.

If you partition a drive on a system that only registers 86% of the drive, the remaining 14% will NOT be available!

Chas

ok yes i,m running xp sp1. in the bios it shows 160gb but windows only shows 137.thnks for reply i kinda figured it would have to show the full disk befor i partition it.this is the biggest hd i have ever had and the only reason i bought it was cuz i nedded it and the mfg rebate was a good deal