200 GB harddrive only giving 130 GB

[AlienNation]

I've just bought a new Maxtor DiamonMax Plus 9 IDE harddrive that's supposed to be 200 GB large. However it only displays as 130 GB. I know that the conventions of measuring harddrive capacities differ a bit since the suppliers measure 1 MB as 1000 KB instead of 1024 or something, but this seems to be too much of a difference.

I'm using a motherboard from EPoX called 8K3A+ and I've currently created one single FAT32 partition of the entire drive since I want it to be shared between Linux and Windows.

Does this seem right or is it possible that my motherboard/bios doesn't support this large drives?

Thanks

[mrBen]

Did you create it in Windows or Linux, and are you measuring the size in Windows or Linux?

Windows (2k/XP IIRC) had an issue with drives > 137GB whereby it did not switch on 48bit addressing, and therefore would not properly recognise drives >137GB. Latest service pack + a registry hack from MS (for 2k).

[JoeyJoeJo]

Ben's right. If you're on XP you need SP2 for sure. Also you need to make sure your motherboard supports 48bit addressing. Check the manufacturer's web site to see. If it's not, usually they have a new bios you can flash.

[bwkaz]

My motherboard supports 48-bit addressing, and it's a couple years old already... (It's a Via KT-400 chipset, though, so maybe it is still newer than yours.)

[AlienNation]

Thanks all. Windows was ofcourse the root of evil... Linux got it right directly.