Why can I only see 137gb of my Drive?
Unfortunately prior to service pack 2, Windows XP would only recognize 137GB of any hard drive. So if you are installing windows XP, it is important that you upgrade to the most recent service pack to be able to view your entire hard drive. The problem I ran into my primary drive is the one I was having issues once windows was up to date, I had no way of extending my current drive beyond the 137gb. If it were a secondary drive I would just reformat the hard drive. So instead I added a partition to the hard drive. That partition would allow me to utilize the entire hard drive, rather than just the 137gb. To add the partition I followed these steps:
First, I right clicked on My Computer and select manage. This brought up a window titled computer management. On the left side of the screen you should see a folder menu. Expand storage and select disk management. In the top left panel you should now see your drives. Select the drive that you are having issues with. Now in the bottom left panel you should see the an image that depicts part of the drive being partitioned and the other part being unpartitioned. You will want to right click on the unpartitioned section and select create partition. I created an extended partition. Once done, you will want to associate this new partition to a drive or a folder. To do this, again right click on this area and select new logical drive. Follow the prompts and wait as the drive is formatted.
Once done, restart and you are ready to go. Say goodbye to the 137gb limitation. Otherwise you may just want to upgrade your OS to a newer version of Windows. My problem above was the disk I was using only came bundled with SP1. If you are to see more than 137GB on your hard drive, you are going to need at least SP2 on Windows XP.