Is there a 130ish GB limit to formatting an NTFS drive when using XP (booting off the cd and installing XP on a new drive that hasnt been formatted)? I have noticed twice now on two different machines where I have put in 180gb drives and only been able to format 130gb of them, when I try to format it using the windows XP (pro) installation format utility. The first time it happened, I wrote it off as an old Bios / motherboard that couldnt support it.. But it turned out that we were able to format another 180gb drive in that machinewith no problem, *after* windows was installed (using windows disk management utility, or whatever its called)

But now, I have a brand new system, Intel E7205 chipset, and I seriously doubt there is a bios limitation going on here..

What's the word on this? I can't find info anywhere..

XP has a limit of 137Gb unless you do some registry hacking, which might be a bit difficult during installation.... Do a search on the M$ site or on this BBS for 137Gb and you will find the registry hack. After XP is installed you could use Partition Magic to increase the partition.

Stig

Here you go...

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/lba.htm

Yeah, I figured I would give XP SP1 a chance and see if it would work after I made the post; and sure enough it sees the "full" drive. I guess I can live with 2 partitions :P Thanks for the info!

You can "slipstream" an XP CD to SP1, so that it will be able to format the entire drive at initial boot. Complete instructions are here.

Very useful. Much obliged!