"Lobster" wrote in message
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"Mathew Newton" wrote in message
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On Mar 26, 10:20 am, "Lobster" wrote:
My (very) old Dell (Windows XP Home) has been getting progressively more
slow and unwieldy, and I decided to try and wring a bit more life out of
it
by reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows - haven't done it
for at least 3 years and it normally helps a lot.

[...]

I stuck in my Windows set up disk, deleted the existing partitions, and
formatted it (NTFCS). However, I was left with only 135 Gb (=127 Gb
formatted). ??? What's going on?

Have you upgraded the new (re)install to at least Service Pack 1? I
seem to recall the original XP release did not support 48bit logical
block addressing hence could not address partition sizes above 137GB.

----------------

Hmm - that sounds plausible: yes I've just done the install using the OEM
disks so far, which are
just the original XP release. However, that said - I came up with the
problem using the MS-DOS format/partition utility built in to the OEM
disks, before I even started the Windows install; also, when I installed
the new HD about 3 years ago I don't remember anything like this (could be
wrong though)...


Last time you would have created the 20GB partition as the primary. The
remaining chunk was probably ans extended partition which, I seem to
remember, was not subject to the same limitations.
--
Tinkerer