How to get win xp to recognize full 250GB hard drive?

[darkman2012]

i recently installed a 250 gb hard drive on a windows xp home PC. it will only recognize 10gb in the OS. the bios sees it as is. what can i do 2 fix this?

 

[WebBeachBoy]

Win XP should recognise drives up to aprox 2TB (but this can be circumvented by using a 64 bit version of windows). Make sure that you have all the service packs and updates properly installed.

 

[cball1311]

You need to check if there is any unallocated space on the drive. To do this, you need to use Disk Management. Start -> Run -> type "compmgmt.msc" (no quotes). Then, in the left pane, find Disk Management. Your disks should appear in the bottom pane showing the partitions on the drive. If your drive has unallocated space, you need to create another partition to use that space.

Use this to make a new logical drive with the unallocated space.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

 

[apache_lives]

if you had vista/7/8 you could expand that partition but you have that dinosaur that makes things hard xp -- get rid of that thing asap

two choices since it wont let you :
1) reformat the hdd totally and start again with a newer xp disk (sp3, or slipstream one etc)
2) use some partition tools (hiren boot cd?) to expand it to full