I know, I posted this problem a while back and I kind of gave up on it for a while. Now it's really bugging me.

Here's the sitrep:

I have a 2nd HD that I'm using as storage on my system. It is a ATA/IDE Seagate Barracuda 250 Gb hard drive on an eVGA nForce 680i SLi motherboard.

First time I plugged it in, it was reading the entire 250 Gb. Since it was just to be used as a 2nd hard drive, I tried to delete everything off of it as I already had my system set up on a primary SATA HD. I couldn't get rid of some inaccessible files (probably from the old XP installation from the previous computer) so I just tried to erase the whole thing using Killdisk. Then I proceeded to format it in XP, and then it showed up as 160 Gb.

LBA and UDMA are auto-detect in BIOS. Did I somehow irretrievably change the HD capacity, locking away a partition forever that doesn't show up?

Already tried checking out my Seagate setup CD for support and went online. They have drive capacity issues, but not for the one I'm having. I'm thinking there's a very simple and stupid step I'm missing somewhere. The CD DID tell me that the XP reading large disk wasn't enabled and it did that for me after rebooting, but still reads as 160 Gb.

Thanks in advance.

Do you have service pack 2 installed?

Yes, I do have SP 2 installed. In fact, I didn't hook up my 2nd HD until I had everything all set up, updated, and installed.

Wipe it, us the CD to format and partition it and go again.

Dang it. I wiped it, formatted it and used the DiscWizard from Seagate to partition it and it's still no go. In fact, in DiscWizard, it still only read 160 Gb. This is kind of driving me nuts. The LBA is enabled in BIOS, so I don't understand this at all. I'm on the verge of just giving up and going with 160 Gb instead of the 250 I know I'm supposed to have.

If it helps, it USED to be the system drive on my old computer.

*EDIT*

Very weird thing just happened. I went into the Device Manager to see how that drive was being listed. It's up and working fine as I figured, BUT...the model number it listed was for a 160 Gb model and not the 250 Gb that I know I have!!! What the hell's going on here?!? I'm trying to find an updated driver for it, but so far no luck.

You sure that isn't a 160GB drive? Check the model number on the drive itself.

That's what I did, and boy, do I feel like a colossal idiot. It IS a 160 Gb model. I have no idea why I thought it was 250. Probably because when I bought the components for my new system, I bought a 250 Gb SATA HD and somehow thought my old IDE was the same capacity.

I must be getting old, damn memory's going on me. Maybe if I bought some RAM and stuck it in my brain...

Sorry to all those who helped me, it was my goof.

Don't worry.. Glad we got this sorted out..

Better than