I hope somebody can advise me.

I recently got a Dell PC that came with XP home, but I wanted XP Pro.

The PC fired up and told me the HDD was 160GB, which is what it should be.

When I put the XP Pro CD in, I deleted the partition and formatted the drive, installed XP Pro - but now I only have a 127GB HDD !!

Would this be a bios problem ?
Would the XP Pro CD have replaced the bios with an older version ?

I have installed all updates including SP2 and everyting works fine, I just want my missing 30GB...

Please help.
Thanks

See if this helps:

How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP

Thanks,
That sounds like the problem but I already have SP1 and 2 installed. Should I apply the hotfix as well ? The article says it is included in SP2 so wouldn't that of fixed it ?

If you have a look at the bios, what size is the hdd there ?

What worked for my 250GB Disk was using Partition Magic after installing Windows XP SP1 to reclaim the empty space.

It says 160GB in the bios

As Bad Karma suggested you probably need to partition the drive.
Also use NTFS rather than FAT if you are not already.

How To Partition using the Recovery Console

google

Ok thanks.

The drive is NTFS.

So I start the PC with the XP CD in the drive, go to repair and there should be approx 30GB unused space, I create a partition here and then when I restart I won't have lost anything but I will have a new drive of approx 30GB.

Am I correct ?

Yes.

You want to enter the Recovery Console:

To run the Recovery Console from CD boot with the Windows XP CD and select "R" at the Welcome Screen.

At the command prompt type DISKPART and press Enter.

If the 30gigs shows up as unpartitioned space then you will be able to partition it.

Otherwise you will need a 3rd party program or else reinstall XP which will allow you to partition as you please.

Thanks very much, I'll give it a go..

The 30 gig didn't show up and I'm not going through reinstalling windows and re-doing all the updates as I'm on dail-up and it takes ages....I guess I'll just have to live with a smaller HDD than I wanted.
Thanks anyway.
Tom