200gb HD limited to 137gb

Hi, I've installed a WD2000JS SATA hard drive in my computer after the old IDE one gave up. Its 200 gigs in size and the bios sees it as 190 somthing gigs which about right I suppose.
The problem I have is when I set up the drive with the bootable datalife tools disc it forced me to limit the size to 137gb incase windows couldnt drive it properly, sorry I dont remember the exact message I got as it was 5am before I finally got xp to recongnise and install on my SATA HD and I was half asleep.
Anyways now that everything is up and running (sp2 and all the updates) I want to know what I have to do to make use of the other 63gb's. Not that I will ever use them but it does seem stupid to me to pay for 200gb's and only have access to 137.

Thanks in advance.

 

Sounds like you need to update your bios on your motherboard as the bios should show the correct size and as you have sp2 installed it would detect almost the correct size.Decimal versus binary is part of the reason you don't always get the full size as windows canculates diffrently than the way the suppliers set these drives up.

 

A 200GB should be around 186 in windows. It showing as 137 means you formatted it before you had SP2, which will limit the size. If you go to disk management (Start->Run and type diskmgmt.msc) you should see the other 49GB as unallocated space, in which case you can format that as an additional partition.

 

Hi john, yes there is a newer bios version for my ABIT NF7-S v2.0 moboard but I dont really want to flash unless its really nesscesary.
The bios posts this right after the 'hit F4 for raid config' screen:
0 WDC WD2000JS-00NCB7 190782MB

That my HD model and I think that size is right for a 200gb HD in a formated state (please correct me if I'm wrong)
I think the prob is that datalife tools has created a 137gb partition and is ignoring the rest. Can I expand that partition now that sp2 is installed?
I will flash my bios if I have to, I'm just a little nervous about something going wrong.

 

sammorris thanks your right, yes the bootable disc preped the HD before the install.
This is what I'm about to do, stop me if I'm wrong: right click the unallocated space in disk management and select new partion then select it as an extended partion. is that right?

 

yes that's correct.

 

Thanks, formating now. Maybe I'll put some linux on there

 

You could if you like, but if you do that, you'll have to format that partition using FAT32, I don't think Linux can read NTFS.

 

ddp, I have a floppy drive I can reinstall and a win98 bootdisk. My xp cd is an upgrade for win98. Just out of curiousity, could I do that without harming my OS?

 

That should work.