HDD problem

I am having a hard drive problem.  I bought this 300GB Seagate hard drive off of Tiger Direct the other day, and I installed it in my brand new computer.  The problem is, W2K was only able to format 127GB of this.  After some reasearch, I found that W2K SP1 only understood the first 127GB of a hard drive, so I upgraded it to SP4 (It was newly installed).  After that, the logical disk manager still only saw the 127 that had been formatted.  So I did some more research, and I found that the Seagate website had a program that could partition the rest.  Unfortunately, I did not pay attention to the details and downloaded the one that is meant to install on blank hard drives.  So after screwing up my hard drive, I decided to reinstall W2K and start over.  However, this time around it only saw 32GB.  I'm worried I may have messed up the hard drive in some way.  Currently it is formatting the 32GB that it sees, and I'm hoping that I will be able to format the rest.  My BIOS does see that it is a 300GB hard drive, and my motherboard is a Mach Speed K8M8MS that supports ATA133 (It is IDE).  Can anyone help me with what is going on?

No idea, but maybe you would be lucky using a Lunix bootcd to re-partition it, or to zero-fill it ( random link off the Google about it: http//w/... )

Ok, I downloaded the correct Seagate DiscWizard program after reinstalling 2K, and I told it to create partition from unpartitioned space.  Now it created a 2000GB partition!
Also, will the Linux CD be able to format a partition NTFS?  If it can't, it really won't help me.

It sounds like you were just reformatting an existing partition instead of creating partitions on the drive.

Anyway, for Linux: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/man/mkntfs.html

>>1
I suppose you haven't set any jumpers on the HD to limit its capacity to 32 or 127 GB.

Is it a SATA HD?

Perform a low-level format of the entire hard disk. There are utilities for any OS; the easiest you can do is to use a Live CD Linux or some utility from your HD vendor.

Then be sure your BIOS recognizes the HD properly. If your BIOS doesn't support 48 bit LBA, you won't see anything over 127 GB. To fix this, you'll have to flash your BIOS, check your motherboard vendor website for the exact model of your motherboard.

Now with a blank HD and a proper BIOS, see if you can find drivers for your hard disk and/or motherboard from your vendors. If you find a driver, save it in a diskette and when you run the Windows 2000 installer, press F6 when told so, and select your driver(s).

Under these circumstances, Windows 2000 should be able to see past 127 GB. I've verified it.

You probably formatted it as fat32, which doesn't go above 32 gb under w2k.

Had you formatted it as an NTFS, you should see up to 128 gb.

Install the service packs and you should be able to see the rest.