Question:
I have an ACER Aspire 3003 WLCI laptop that came with XP and a 40 gb hard drive. The drive crashed and I purchased a WD250 drive, but when I install it and install the software that came with the laptop it only formats the drive as a 132 gb partition. CMOS recognizes it as a WD250.
How can I get the full use of drive space????
Aswer:
Use a slipstreamed copy of XP SP2 or SP3. Not the OEM CD that came with your laptop which is XP w/o any SP, the cause of not supporting 48-bit block addressing and only recognising up to 132GB.
After clean installing, load the latest chipset driver, video driver and various other drivers for your laptop.
Get chipset and video driver from the manufacturer e.g. Intel and other bits from the OEM of your laptop e.g. HP/Dell/...