To any and all that could help, i'd be extremely grateful.. just
explaining why this behavior is taking place would be great. In
advance, i dont see WHY i'm hitting the 127g barrier -- nor why its so
wierdly inconsistent.

Here Goes..

In preparation for some rather severe changes, we're currently taking
Norton Ghost backups of all 400 machines in our building, which
obviously requires a lot of disk space... The backup server (really a
desktop) was therefore fitted with a 300 GB hard drive -- our company
environment is pretty much Windows 2000, and so we installed it, and
were able only to "see" 120GB on the HD.. mmc's disk manager gave the
same result (a 120GB disk). Here, at least results were consistent.

Trying to get to the other 180GB that should have been available, we
wiped (internal lingo here for all bits to 0 - fixes a surprising
amount of strange installs) the HD, and installed XP SP2. Now stuff
gets a little strange. Everything WindowsExplorer-related shows C:\ as
a 1.6GB drive (?!) with 166MB free. (strange? not yet...). Disk Manager
in mmc is different in XP. In the top half of the window, it shows
1.66G, 9% free (ish) , in the bottom half of the window, it shows a
"Healthy" 297GB drive, NTFS formatted. No unpartitioned space.
Right-clicking on the partition for properties again shows that darn
1.66G drive.

Any ideas at all?
I thought at first that it might be Ghost causing the problems (our
Windows installs are "ghost"ed from a server) by its attempt to format
and/or partition such a huge disk while essentially running MS-DOS. We
are, however, using a relatively recent version of Ghost, for the W2K
images v8.0 (ok, old-ish now) and for the XPSP2 images, v2003. And MMC
should be able to see the disk anyway, and show some empty space.

it's a HP/Compaq dc7100, it has the lates BIOS/Firmware installed, the
300G is its only Harddisk.

bandwagon jumpers, please read the PS below.

I think that if someone could explain how/why W2K sp4 recognizes 120GB,
and XPSP2 recognizes only 1.6 it might go a long way to finding a
solution.

The only other solution I can see right now is a Linux LiveCD boot to
reformat the drive as ext2 or something; and then transfer the backup
files to it while in linux, seeing as it will (almost certainly -- i
havent tested) recognize the full size.

A non-solution is partitioning the drive before the Windows install, so
that there are, for example, 3 100G partitions. The Windows install
that we are forced to use (i.e. basically "ghost"ed and tiny
modifications) would nuke it.

After having rambled... if anyone sees the full solution, i'd be
extremely grateful. I'd also be very happy, however, with an
explanation of why XPSP2 runs, but recognizes 1.6G(except as noted),
W2Ksp4 recognizes 120G, when the size is 300. It is possible/likely
that the drive is SATA, but I don't think that should cause the wierd
behavior, especially since it happens whether BIOS IDE emulation is on
or off. Weren't both 2Ksp4 and XPsp2 supposed to fully address 127G
disks (except USB)?

Many thanks for any response, and if you're reading this, thanks for
hearing me out!

Rgds,
-D1

PS. (Yes, _ALL_ our software, including the Ghost images of Windows is
fully legal and fully licensed. duh)
Yes, i know 300G is not enough for 400 machines -- we only need to keep
10 days worth of backups -- about 275G. Had to point this out, it's the
USEnet after all

PPS. The BIOS recognises the drive as 300G -- whether that means it
just queried it for some ASCII strings or it actually means anything, I
don't know.