Have scanned through the Collective Wisdom before I posted, hope you can help.
I have a Seagate 250GB PATA HDD (ST3250824A) installed as a Secondary slave drive on my system (running WinXP SP2), and I am unable to fully utilize the drive (250GB) fully.
BIOS detects it perfectly (recognising model-ST3250824A, full capacity-250GB), but when I try to format it in WinXP (using Disk Management), I have no luck, with NTFS partition formatted unsuccessfully (as informed by WinXP) even though it proceeds until like 99%.
Have tried formating in smaller partitions of 32GB each, with limited success - left with about 100GB not able to format (same problem - formatted unsuccessfully).
Even tried with Seagate's diagnostics DiscWizard - no luck. Low level format in Dos using latest fdisk recognizes the full partition, but was advised to format in Windows, leading me back to square one (formatted unsuccessfully).
Can my problem be solved with a BIOS upgrade? And which one?
Thanks in advance - am at wits end
Program: eSupport.com BIOS Agent Version 3.52
BIOS Date: 01/29/02
BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG
BIOS ID: 01/29/2002-i845-6A69VAWBC
OEM Sign-On: (82mar1b1) EVALUATION ROM - NOT FOR SALE
Chipset: Intel 1A30 rev 4
Superio: Unknown
OS: WinXP SP2
CPU: Intel Pentium(R) 4 1600 Mhz MAX: 2400 Mhz
BIOS ROM In Socket: Yes
BIOS ROM Size: 256K
Memory Installed: 512 MB
Memory Maximum: 2048 MB
Memory Slot 01: 256 MB
Memory Slot 02: 256 MB
