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My Western Digital EIDE 160gb drive now apears in XP as 128GB, not the usual 149gb it usually was. Its a secondary drive, used for storage only. Its not bootable.

I had Norton GoBack installed and then removed it. I have a gut feeling that GoBack has altered my drive somehow.

I've tried fdisk, but it says that there are no more partitions on it.

I've also tried partition Magic, same thing: 128mb


Any ideas how I can get the missing GB's back?

You could download software from their website (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=1) and zero fill the hard drive. This should make it as if it was new. Did something on your motherboard's bios change?

I had a copy of Data Life Guard 10 (with 0's ability). I did that.
The Data Life Guard sees the drive as 149GB.

I did update the BIOS to F7 for the motherboard.

Perhaps I'll try FDISK again now that I've done the zero fill.

thanks redk9258.

You got me thinking down another line, which solved the problem:

Update the driver on the ATA100 card.

Worked like a charm. The drive was attached to directly to my MB in the last system. In this build, I had to put it on the ATA100 card.

I was going at the problem by trying out the difficult stuff 1st (BIOS settings, XP Registry settings etc).

Glad you got it! Have you found WD to be reliable? I have one that the bearings went bad on. It was replaced under warranty. The replacement seems to be holding up OK. I have had good luck with Maxtor drives. Some people say they aren't reliable either. I guess all brands can fail and the people who say X brand is no good had one fail while thousands of other people have no problems.

lol. Murphy's Law.

The Wd 3 year warranty ended on Dec 25th.
The drive has just now developed a loud squeal, and seldom runs.
I tried it in the external USB 2.0/Firewire case and it still does it.

1 dead drive.

Good thing I pick up my 250gb SATA2 drive next week in Florida.