So, I finally put together a quiet system. Everything went fairly smoothly except for working around a Ninja and those blasted fan clips. Things went smoothly until I went to install a fresh copy of XP I've had for a while. Problem is, I can boot off the CD, but when I go to format my nice shiny new 500GB Samsung, it can only recognize 127GB or so, and I really don't want to deal with partitioning.
So my question is how I can get the HD formatted w/o a partition? (I would just slap the drive into another system but the new drive is SATA and nothing else around here is).
Formatting large hard disk
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Lawrence Lee
- SPCR Reviewer
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- Location: Vancouver
I believe you need Service Pack 2 to see all the space on the drive. You can make a new XP CD with SP2 slimstreamed into it with a program like nlite. A Google search will bring up instructions on how to do this.
Personally though I think you should partition it and after it's installed put SP2 on it and recover the rest of the space as a 2nd partition. If something corrupts Windows and you want to reformat/reinstall, anything you put on the 2nd partition won't be touched, i.e. all the data you want to keep. I like to make an image of my Windows partition using Ghost right after it's been fulling updated and the drivers have been installed, and put it on my 2nd partition. When I want to startover with a fresh copy of Windows I just restore that image, no fuss, no muss.
Personally though I think you should partition it and after it's installed put SP2 on it and recover the rest of the space as a 2nd partition. If something corrupts Windows and you want to reformat/reinstall, anything you put on the 2nd partition won't be touched, i.e. all the data you want to keep. I like to make an image of my Windows partition using Ghost right after it's been fulling updated and the drivers have been installed, and put it on my 2nd partition. When I want to startover with a fresh copy of Windows I just restore that image, no fuss, no muss.