I have a Western Digital 160gig hd in an external usb configuration. It shows up as 31 gigs and will not let me format it to 137gigs. Do I have to hook it up to another machine and use the Western Digital CD to format it or is there another way to make it reconize it as 137 gigs? I've tried everything I can think of and can't get it to see it as more than 31 gigs. I have win xp with sp2 media center.

Thanks.

Have you tried looking at the drive under Disk management? As in, Right click on my computer, click on manage, click on disk management. Do you see the drive? Perhaps you need to format the rest of the drive. Or remove the partition, and recreate it and format. All this can be done with this tool.

Actually I have but it shows it as 31 gig also. I will try deleting it and seeing if it will let me reformat it at a higher number value. If it will. So far I havn't gotten frustrated and have kept a cool head lol. Thanks though I will try it again. Also sorry I posted in the wrong section that poll about multi player games . IF someone could delete it or move it I'd appreciate it.

Try reformatting using NTFS rather than FAT32 as there is a 32GB limit for FAT32 partitions in XP.

One method to format drive X to NTFS:

Start -> Run: cmd

format x: /FS:NTFS

I've tried formatting it with NTFS and it still shows up at 31 gig no matter how I format it, it will not let me make it bigger

Check the jumper setting.

It would be nice to take that drive apart, and physically hooking up the hard drive to your computer, via the ide cable. I wonder if there would be a difference in this situation.

Can you create several 32GB partitions in XP computer management ?

That seems to work for me. I have a 250GB drive also usb connected and computer management sees the size of the disk but it does not let me format partitions bigger than 32GB succesfully. Maybe you should try diskmanager from ontrack.

Let me know if you have found a solution: I will if I have.

Greetz,
Akitoto.