timW

I don't know where everyone got the idea I have win 2000 on board. I've had XP on my computer fo some time. It has been some time since I posted on here, so perhaps someone picked up on an old posting and went with it from there. My fault perhaps, as I was so intent on listing hardware and neglected to point out the operating system on board.

As for the problem with the card, I have since discovered that it was not seated firmly enough in the PCI slot - it's the only slot left, and it was such a squeeze to get it in I that wasn't sure it had seated properly.

Problem is that it hasn't helped matters at all. I now find that my system moves along at the pace of a dying snail - it takes XP about 20 minutes to boot up, and the cursor stutters across the screen like you wouldn't believe.

I'm practically at the point of giving up on getting full use of the HD and just accepting the 137GB limitation I initially ran up against (which oddly enough turned out to be only 120GB when I looked at the drive later on 'my computer'.

As a couple of people have pointed out, this is all rather surprising to me as I fully expected the system to readily accept the HD at full capacity.

Is there anything in BIOS I perhaps need to change?

And I do get an error message on the intitial black screen at start up that says 'device not found!', if that means anything to anyone. I've always had an error message at start up as well which says 'BIOS not installed', which someone on this forum told me ages ago is nothing to worry about. But again, I do wonder if this may be a contributing problem to this situation.

The other odd thing I don't understand is why the system has such a hard time with an onboard HD that's over 137GB capacity yet has no problems dealing with the external 200GB HD I use for periodically backing my system up via a firewire connection.

Thanks........Tim