250GB SATA II hard drive + drive letter assignment

My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
WD2500JS-60NCB1.
I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB of
the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the hard
drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built in
USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
drive is being assigned E.
My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
(MS-7030),
with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.

My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to update
from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I reformat
my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
partition?
Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?


Angie

"Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
> But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
> causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
> of
> the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
> hard
> drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
> in
> USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
> drive is being assigned E.
> My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> (MS-7030),
> with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
>
> My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> update
> from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> reformat
> my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
> partition?
> Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
>
>
> Angie

Try changing the disk letters in Disk Management. Right click on the drive
and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.

Maincat wrote:

> "Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
>
>>My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
>>WD2500JS-60NCB1.
>>I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
>>But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
>>causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
>>of
>>the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
>>hard
>>drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
>>in
>>USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
>>drive is being assigned E.
>>My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
>>(MS-7030),
>>with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
>>WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
>>
>>My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
>>update
>>from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
>>reformat
>>my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
>>partition?
>>Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
>>
>>
>>Angie
>
>
> Try changing the disk letters in Disk Management. Right click on the drive
> and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.
>
>

One cannot change the drive letters of the system drive. The only way
to make the system drive as Drive C under these circumstances is to
disconnect the IDE drive and the USB card reader. Install the SATA drive,
boot WinXP setup from the cdrom drive, and install XP into the SATA drive.
Because the OP is using the original Windows XP, it will partition only
the first 132 GB as Drive C. (The OP might want to consider slipstreaming
SP2 into the original Windows XP).

"Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
> But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
> causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
> of
> the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
> hard
> drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
> in
> USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
> drive is being assigned E.
> My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> (MS-7030),
> with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
>
> My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> update
> from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> reformat
> my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
> partition?
> Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
>
>
> Angie


Angie:
You have apparently two problems here...

You probably installed the XP OS onto your new SATA HDD while another HDD
was still connected...possibly the previous boot HDD you say "crashed". It's
best to disconnect all HDDs from the system when installing the XP OS.

The second problem is that you did not have SP1 or SP2 installed on your XP
installation CD when you used that CD to install the OS. Because of that the
system detected only the 127.99 GB you mentioned; the remaining disk space
was designated "unallocated".

It would be best if you would "slipstream" SP2 onto your XP installation CD.
Use a simple program like Autostreamer to accomplish this. You can do a
Google search on "autostreamer" to download that free program and obtain
instructions to use it.

If you don't want to go through the slipstreaming process (although it's
quite simple) you can fresh install the XP OS onto the SATA HDD again with
your current XP installation CD, but this time with all other drives
disconnected as indicated above. You could then install SP2 onto your system
and the entire disk space of your 250 GB HDD will be recognized. However,
there will still be that unallocated disk space that you now can format. So
if you can live with two partitions that's another option. But all in all it
would really be better if you would use a slipstreamed XP installation CD
including SP2.
Anna

You'll need to reinstall without the USB card readers attached. As
mentioned, your drivespace issue is due to installing XP without SP2
installed, which accesses drives >250GB (you can do so in previous versions
using a registry hack, but that won't help you in text-mode setup while
partioning the system drive).

Follow the posted instructions for creating a CD with SP2 slipstreamed into
it and then reinstall XP with the card reader disconnected so you can
partition your drive to the full capacity and have it be C:.

Joe

"Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
> But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
> causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
> of
> the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
> hard
> drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
> in
> USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
> drive is being assigned E.
> My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> (MS-7030),
> with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
>
> My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> update
> from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> reformat
> my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
> partition?
> Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
>
>
> Angie

When I installed WinXP onto my new harddrive, there was no other hard drive
connected to my system. I threw out my old ide hard drive after discovering
it had 3 bad sectors. One of them in the boot sector. I will try unplugging
my floppy with the card readers, and making a slipstream XP SP2 disk. My cd
rom is ide. Will this cause a problem with the drive letter assignment?
Thanks for all you input.

Angie


"Anna" wrote:

>
> "Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> > My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> > WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> > I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
> > But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
> > causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
> > of
> > the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
> > hard
> > drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
> > in
> > USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
> > drive is being assigned E.
> > My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> > (MS-7030),
> > with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> > WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
> >
> > My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> > update
> > from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> > reformat
> > my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
> > partition?
> > Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
> >
> >
> > Angie
>
>
> Angie:
> You have apparently two problems here...
>
> You probably installed the XP OS onto your new SATA HDD while another HDD
> was still connected...possibly the previous boot HDD you say "crashed". It's
> best to disconnect all HDDs from the system when installing the XP OS.
>
> The second problem is that you did not have SP1 or SP2 installed on your XP
> installation CD when you used that CD to install the OS. Because of that the
> system detected only the 127.99 GB you mentioned; the remaining disk space
> was designated "unallocated".
>
> It would be best if you would "slipstream" SP2 onto your XP installation CD.
> Use a simple program like Autostreamer to accomplish this. You can do a
> Google search on "autostreamer" to download that free program and obtain
> instructions to use it.
>
> If you don't want to go through the slipstreaming process (although it's
> quite simple) you can fresh install the XP OS onto the SATA HDD again with
> your current XP installation CD, but this time with all other drives
> disconnected as indicated above. You could then install SP2 onto your system
> and the entire disk space of your 250 GB HDD will be recognized. However,
> there will still be that unallocated disk space that you now can format. So
> if you can live with two partitions that's another option. But all in all it
> would really be better if you would use a slipstreamed XP installation CD
> including SP2.
> Anna
>
>
>

If you only have your sata hd, cd rom conected a new win installation will
be to the C drive (your sata)
You can leave the floppy connected, just disconnect card reader and any
other cd/dvd drives

"Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1D4A795B-9B32-496B-8D19-8E6F6C9ADB7B@microsoft.com...
> When I installed WinXP onto my new harddrive, there was no other hard
drive
> connected to my system. I threw out my old ide hard drive after
discovering
> it had 3 bad sectors. One of them in the boot sector. I will try
unplugging
> my floppy with the card readers, and making a slipstream XP SP2 disk. My
cd
> rom is ide. Will this cause a problem with the drive letter assignment?
> Thanks for all you input.
>
> Angie
>
>
> "Anna" wrote:
>
> >
> > "Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> > news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> > > My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> > > WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> > > I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without
incident.
> > > But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This
is
> > > causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted
127.99 GB
> > > of
> > > the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of
the
> > > hard
> > > drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2
built
> > > in
> > > USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd
rw
> > > drive is being assigned E.
> > > My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> > > (MS-7030),
> > > with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> > > WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
> > >
> > > My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> > > update
> > > from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> > > reformat
> > > my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the
only
> > > partition?
> > > Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
> > >
> > >
> > > Angie
> >
> >
> > Angie:
> > You have apparently two problems here...
> >
> > You probably installed the XP OS onto your new SATA HDD while another
HDD
> > was still connected...possibly the previous boot HDD you say "crashed".
It's
> > best to disconnect all HDDs from the system when installing the XP OS.
> >
> > The second problem is that you did not have SP1 or SP2 installed on your
XP
> > installation CD when you used that CD to install the OS. Because of that
the
> > system detected only the 127.99 GB you mentioned; the remaining disk
space
> > was designated "unallocated".
> >
> > It would be best if you would "slipstream" SP2 onto your XP installation
CD.
> > Use a simple program like Autostreamer to accomplish this. You can do a
> > Google search on "autostreamer" to download that free program and obtain
> > instructions to use it.
> >
> > If you don't want to go through the slipstreaming process (although it's
> > quite simple) you can fresh install the XP OS onto the SATA HDD again
with
> > your current XP installation CD, but this time with all other drives
> > disconnected as indicated above. You could then install SP2 onto your
system
> > and the entire disk space of your 250 GB HDD will be recognized.
However,
> > there will still be that unallocated disk space that you now can format.
So
> > if you can live with two partitions that's another option. But all in
all it
> > would really be better if you would use a slipstreamed XP installation
CD
> > including SP2.
> > Anna
> >
> >
> >

"Angie" wrote
> When I installed WinXP onto my new harddrive, there was no other hard
> drive
> connected to my system. I threw out my old ide hard drive after
> discovering
> it had 3 bad sectors. One of them in the boot sector. I will try
> unplugging
> my floppy with the card readers, and making a slipstream XP SP2 disk. My
> cd
> rom is ide. Will this cause a problem with the drive letter assignment?
> Thanks for all you input.

Here are some links for slipstreaming SP2. Autostreamer makes it easier.

Slipstream

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/

Autostreamer
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1092632287/1
http://www.simplyguides.net/guides/u...ostreamer.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562

There should be no problems with drive letter assignments. After the OS is
installed connect the other drives, and you can assign them the drive
letters you want (except for the floppy which will take A through disk
management.



--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]

"Maincat" wrote

> "Angie" wrote
>> My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
>> WD2500JS-60NCB1.
>> I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
>> But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
>> causing problems with several programs.

<snip>

> Try changing the disk letters in Disk Management. Right click on the
> drive and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.

Unfortunately you can't reassign the drive letters for the system and boot
volumes.

--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]

"Angie" <Angie@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5622456D-FC38-4D8C-A96B-9E6788A97307@microsoft.com...
> My ide hard drive crashed. I purchased a SATA II Western Digital
> WD2500JS-60NCB1.
> I formatted the drive and installed WinXP Professional without incident.
> But, during the install it assigned my hard drive to letter F. This is
> causing problems with several programs. Also, it only formatted 127.99 GB
> of
> the hard drive. Under disk management services it shows the rest of the
> hard
> drive, 104.89 GB, as unallocated space. My 3.5" floppy drive has 2 built
> in
> USB card readers. They are being assigned to C and D, then my IDE dvd rw
> drive is being assigned E.
> My mother board supports large hard drives. It is a MSI K8N Neo-V2.0
> (MS-7030),
> with a 754 nforce 3 chipset. Bios version is Phoenix - Award
> WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG.
>
> My copy of WinXP Professional does not contain SP1 or SP2 (I have to
> update
> from MS website). This new hard drive is my only hard drive. If I
> reformat
> my hard drive is it possible to get the whole 250GB formatted as the only
> partition?
> Is it possible to get my hard drive assigned to C?
>
>
> Angie

The drive letter assignment sounds like old SATA bios with onboard ide.
That is, SATA is taking a back seat to onboard ide. Should be an option in
the bios to remap your SATA drive as primary master ide. The cdrom should
be on the secondary ide. Both ide controllers must be enabled in the bios
for this to function properly.

Anna told how to fix the 128GB limitation problem.
Dave