Strange little hiccup here. I'm in the midst of formatting my 2nd hard drive but it's listing itself as a 152 Gb capacity hard drive while I KNOW it's 250 Gb. There wasn't an "erase" function in the computer manager as there used to be. So I just deleted the partition that's the hard drive contained. Now I'm formatting it. NTFS, of course.

I was thinking of using Killdisk to completely wipe my 2nd hard drive, but unsure if I'll be able to select the correct drive in the program.

Any suggestions?

What OS and Service pack are you using?

What you seem to be having is an OS issue, but it may be a bios issue, how old is the computer?

XP service pack 2, everything's updated. Computer's brand new, just built it a couple of weeks ago. I have a SATA hard drive as my primary hard drive and an older IDE hard drive that's secondary. The old HD had stuff on it and I already transferred what I needed over to the primary. Tried to delete everything on it, but was unable to as some files were apparently inaccessible and just gave up on it and deleted the partition and formatted it.

I'm guessing some data is still on the old HD but I can't access it now that I've formatted it. Reading it as 150 Gb and not the 250 Gb that it really is.

Have you used the disk management snap in?

Start > run > type compmgmt.msc /s {enter}

double click the disk management entry in the left hand tree and see if the whole hard drive is recognized.

Try the setup and diagnostic tools from the hard drive manufacturer's website.

Oldf@rt,

That's where I deleted and formatted the partition. It's only reading as 150 (well, 152 to be precise) Gb and should be 250 Gb.

I'm thinking of using Killdisk over the weekend and see if I can't specify that particular hard drive to erase and not accidentally my primary one.

Well, I went into Killdisk and to my surprise, even THAT is reading it at only 150 Gb.

Now I'm afraid that there's no way to erase/reformat it back to 250 Gb as it was supposed to be. Is that possible?

I'd take usasma's advice and try to download a diagnostic tool from the hard drive manufacturer's website.

Definately use the manfacturers diagnostics program, everything else seems to be ok. I have seen this once before on a new westerndigital drive, turned out that one of the drive heads would not read or write.

Each drive manufacturer builds different stuff into it's hard drives. So using the utility designed by the folks who designed the drive is the most likely avenue to achieve success.