Installing Windows XP on 500 gig drive ...

[Hum]

^ I have a copy of that, somewhere.

I also have CDs that will fully format the 500 gig drive, however the original 2001 Windows XP cd will not install on a drive larger than 137 gigs.

It will tell you that the drive must be reformatted.

After taking a little break from this problem, I will delve into the slipstreaming.

Note that most web sites are saying that you can not slipstream SP3 with an original, non-service pack XP cd.

I will attempt an SP3 ss, with my 2001 disc, but it may not work.

[Captain Blarney]

^ Slipstream SP3 onto the disk. You'll be fine ;).

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

Good, free partitioning program:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Nlite is a good, simple way to slipstream as well BTW:

http://www.nliteos.com/

[farmeunit]

Obviously you can as shown in my screen shots.

Obviously you can see I said I heard that you couldn't and I didn't try.

[Eric Veteran]

[Thread Cleaned]

That's enough of the attacks and bootlegging discussion. Please keep the thread on topic or it will be closed and warnings handed out. It is NOT ok to discuss obtaining copyrighted software from anywhere other than its authorized source. Microsoft has not approved the "torrents" as an authorized distributor as far as I've heard.

[+BudMan MVC]

There is 337.77 gigs of unallocated drive space.

And I see no way to expand the 127.99 partition.

Ok my bad I guess for not completely walking through this.. I forget sometimes how completely lazy and unable to search on their own most users are. And been using vista and w7 so long forgot that XP does not have built in expand of the system part.. Anyway there are plenty of FREE tools out there to do this..

Ok so I can do a walk through I cloned a vdi to get a larger disk in windows install - pretty much exactly what your doing, you create a partition on what windows saw as 137GB disk.. Now its seeing the full 500GB after sp3 install. I would of walked through using xp gold and then updating to sp3 to show you the new disk size, etc.. But only copies of xp I have are either sp2 or sp3 already on them.

So you start with something like this

You end up with something like this

So just grab your fav partition manager, easeus, gparted, etc.. and resize the partition.

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

With easeus you don't even have to reboot ;) No booting any CD's etc. .etc..

Shazam!! Your now using the full size of your disk!

Slip streaming will work too - but since you already have the OS installed with sp3, etc.. Just need to resize your existing partition to whatever size over the 137GB you want.

[Hum]

Well after a few hit-and-miss efforts, I have finally resolved this.

1. You can not slipstream original 1.0 Windows XP Pro, with service pack 3.

2. You can not expand your main OS partition, from the C drive. (would need the drive as secondary on another PC)

3. Acronis True Image [for Western Digital] failed to work. (no idea why)

4. I was rather amused that some posters assumed my hardware was as old as Windows XP.

I have gone thru 2 or 3 power supplies, 3 CD drives, now a DVD drive.

I think 4 motherboards now, 4 CPU upgrades, and we don't even want to discuss hard drives ! :laugh:

The best solution in my case, was to use WD Data Life-guard tools, the Drive-to-Drive Copy.

My other screwy drive with Win XP did a long format of the Blue 500 gig drive.

Then Drive-to-Drive Copy did actually move the sp3 XP OS, and all other files to the Blue drive.

I then ran an Error check on Blue, XP found 1 bad cluster, and fixed that.

I yanked out that file and reCopied that movie file, to eliminate that corruption.

I managed to remove the Free folder, which was a separate partition on the old Green drive.

I have now disconnected the other SATA green drive.

I have achieved what I wanted -- a fully formatted 500 gig drive with Windows XP pro installed.

So far, it is running like a champ.

I thought I would post this, in case it may ever be helpful to someone else.

Thanks for all the well-meaning replies. ;)