Anna wrote:

>>twjeff wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I cannot get XP to intall on my new SATA drive. I have a brand new Asus
>>>p5b deluxe motherboard, with a 320GB SataII HDD. It will only recognize
>>>131MB of this drive to partition... What gives? I thought this issue
>>>was resolved already.... Please help! I only have my oritional XP disk,
>>>which does not have big drive or SP 1 or 2 on it..
>
>
>
> "John John" <audetweld@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote in message
> news:eAyh9m3VHHA.4632@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>
>>Press F6 very early on during the Setup routine and feed it the SATA
>>drivers. Pay close attention when the XP setup starts, early on at the
>>bottom of the screen you will see a prompt telling you to press F6 to
>>install Raid or Mass Storage Device drivers. You have to catch it at that
>>time or else you will have to reboot and start the setup routine again.
>>You MUST supply the drivers on a floppy diskette, the setup program will
>>not accept the drivers from any other media source. The SATA drivers
>>should be on your motherboard driver CD. Read the documentation for your
>>mobo or go to the Asus web site and see if the drivers are available there
>>for download. If you have no diskette drive you can temporarily fit one
>>to the computer, if not you will have to slipstream the drivers to a
>>Windows XP cd that you will have to burn.
>>
>>John
>
>
>
> twjeff:
> No, the problem is not recognition of your SATA HDD. Rather you've run up
> against the large-capacity disk barrier because you hadn't SP1 or SP2
> installed on your XP operating system at the time you installed your 320 GB
> HDD.
>
> Without SP1 or SP2, the system will recognize only up to (about) 137 GB (or
> 128 GB binary) of hard drive disk space.
>
> So install SP2 to your system and the full capacity of your HDD will be
> recognized. The remaining disk space above what is currently recognized will
> be designated as "unallocated" disk space. So you will use XP's Disk
> Management utility to partition/format that disk space. So at a minimum you
> will have two partitions.
> Anna

That's what I figured at first but he says he can't install at all. I
know that without the Service Pack the system won't recognize the full
drive capacity but otherwise, as you have pointed out, he should have
been able to install if the SATA was being properly recognize or seen.

John