You should be able to plug in the drive and it should be recognized without
any special drivers as long as your USB ports work.

In Disk Management, are you attempting to format the drive as a FAT 32
drive? (TO check, start disk management and look at the File System type in
the window that opens. If so this would be your problem as XP will only
format the FAT 32 type of partition to 32 GB in size.

Right click on the drive in disk manager and delete the current partition/s
and repartition it using the full size of the drive and make sure that NTFS
is the format chosen or you will get the 32 GB size again.

You also need to have at least SP1 installed on your computer or the system
will limit the drive to 130 GB or so of size.

What type of disk enclosure are you using? I have one old 3.5" disk
enclosure that will only take a maximum of a 40 GB IDE HDD while I have a
SimpleTech enclosure that had a 120 GB drive that died and I put a 300 GB
drive in it with no problems.

Let me know what happens with the repartition and format and the type of
enclosure you are using.


"NashvilleCobra2004" <NashvilleCobra2004@yahoo.com(donotsapm)> wrote in
message news:E1615B5D-1C12-4F8B-9539-3BEEBAA5DABC@microsoft.com...
>I purchased a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 250 gig drive. Because I do not any
> additional slots I decided to purchase an external case (not from Maxtor)
> and
> install this using USB 2.0,
>
> When I install the hard drive, using plug and play, the disk management
> window picks up on 30 gig of the 250 gig drive????
>
> Maxtor indicated that I need a third party driver but isn't that againist
> all of the XP features that we are paying for? Do I need an external
> driver?
> Or, are there internal settings, within Windows XP Media Center, that I
> need
> to change to get the entire 250 gig to show up?
>
>
> --
> GPJ - Nashville