The mysteries of hard drive capacity

I recently have the joy of installing two spanking new 200gig hard drives into an extra tower system I have under my desk at home. Now this experience was fraught with lots of fun that only tech geeks like myself could love including long strolls through the BIOS, endless jumper position fiddling, multiple card slot swaps, various cable positions, and the ever joyous Windows configuration. Most of this happy work went along just fine (meaning it took a long time to do and was very complicated but intellectually rewarding with lots of “ah ha!” moments) with the notable exception that Windows only understood 120gigs of the 200gig drive. Never fear says the manufacturer, just download this little thing, reconfigure your BIOS, set a couple switches and all weill be well. All is well with one drive, but the other still looks small to windows.

This morning, I ran across a very helpful white paper which explains the many various hard drive size problem quite well. Worth the read.