Hello,
I've taken down one of my servers that has 3 ata 133 200GB hard drives in it. I want to reuse one or more of these in my windows xp box.

I installed one of the hard drive sin my XP box and booted up in windows and when I went to view the drive windows tells me that i need to format the drive. Fair enough.

I selected ok, but XP is telling me that the drive is only 34.1GB in size but I know that it's really 200GB. My assumption is that when I setup the linux server I formatted the hard drive for Linux (even though it was never actually used) so now I'd like to know what I need to do to get the full drive back in windows xp.

Thanks if you can help.

Did you try Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Storage --> Disk Management?

You could always boot a GParted Live CD and reformat the drive.

Yes, I did use the disk management but it is still reporting it as 34.1GB. I delete the partition thinking that would work, then create a new partition but windows still tells me that it's only 34.1GB I've also tried the Maxtor Maxblast 4 utility and it also tells me that it's a 34.1GB hard drive.

Im guessing it needs what we used to do in the old days, which was a low level format to remove the linux partition that seems the likely culprit to cause this. But I no longer know how to do that in windows xp or what I would need anymore since I no longer have a floppy drive.

I'm downloading Gparted Live now to see how that goes.

Hey i,m a bit of a newbie but ive had to reformat a few drives recently myself. G-parted is great but you can use almost any linux live cd if youve got one around. Just boot from the cd (in text only mode if it lets you) and use the cfdisk command

"cfdisk /dev/hda" or similar

it doesnt have a bells and whistles GUI but it lets you delete and add partitions no probs and it'll at least show you what partitions are on the disk (that windows might not be recognising)

hope this helps

Okay thanks guys. I downloaded Gparted and booted from the CD, then I partitioned the hard drive and Gparted did it's thing and said that it was 189.xGB. I exited Gparted and rebooted, and checked the system bios who then told me that the HDD was only 33.xGB So it's got to be something else that is messing up somewhere, because after checking the bios I then booted into Gparted again and the disk was not partitioned again just like it was the first time I checked on it.

It's like Gparted said it partitioned the drive (using ntfs) and said it had accomplished it but then rebooting and re-entering gparted again and it says that there are no partitions on that drive again. I know this is a good drive as it's never even been used. It was possibly partitioned in linux, and then the power and cable were unplugged for the past 10 months and it's just sat in the box doing nothing.

Im stumped.

A shot in the dark:
Big harddisks often have a jumper to 'limit' it to 32GB. As far as I know, this just forces the HD to report the size to be 32 GB.
Maybe that that's causing the problems.

If this solves it, the next issue that you may encounter is the 137GB limit. This is depending on the WinXP service pack that you have (I think you need at least SP1).