Hard Drive not recognized

The BIOS in the ACER determines the maximum size of the hard drive it can support.
Check the laptop's specification to see the max size you can install in this model laptop.
It appears that the max size your laptop can support is 140 Gb (unformatted). 137Gb formatted.

I suggest you install a hard drive up to 140 Gb capacity in your laptop and place the 320 Gb hard drive in an USB hard drive adapter case and when you attach this hard drive to the USB port in your ACER laptop then you will be able to get the full 320 Gb capacity after you delete the partition and create a 320 Gb partition and format the hard drive.

The best software that can fix this problem is "Power Quest Partition Magic".It works like a dream for drives of any capacity!

Hi,
You mentioned that you have never formatted this hard drive. Has this been FDisk and Partitioned? If the hard drive has never been Fdisk / Partitioned / Formatted, this will not be recognized in the windows environment.
You can use DISKPART in command line to manage and partition your hard drive. After formating it in your preferred format (NTFS is recommended). Your hard drive should display properly in windows explorer.
Hope this helps.

It reveals that previously this device was formatted by the highest operating system other than you are using. For example if one floppy formatted within windows 95 it will recognized by the other operating system but if the floppy formatted in 98 that would not recognized by the windows 95 and the operating system will ask for format as you already experienced.

It's complicated to explain, but basically, you never get the full amount of space on your hard drive. For instance, a 320gb drive will always provide you with aprox. 298gb of space. However, your 137 vs 250 is a bit extreme. Is this a new hard drive? Have you made sure you have properly formatted and partitioned the drive? If this is a used drive, the previous owner may have it partitioned to use only part if the drive, so in this case I would try and format it.

Use the WD data life guard disc to partition the drive. Put the disc in, reboot the computer, and run data life guard. A screen comes up and asks if your system can recognize a partition greater than 137 gb. If your system can read larger than 137, then use the option to format one large partition.

Some OS cannot read larger than 137gb. Also some Bios have the same problem.

*********** board have no support LBA 48bit adressing.
If you want to use so big HDD, you must to upgrade bios (for LBA 48 bit) or change motherboard for new one.

137 gig is a classic maxium harddrive limit for older BIOSes. Yamaha does not have a public firmware upgrade avalibe. since there is no way to flash the bios, it is impossible to upgrade it :-/

check your bios if the disk is recognized as 500gb first. if it is not recognized, update your motherboard bios. most updates are available in their manufacturers site.

I recomended you to use ULTIMATE BOOT CD 4.0 and to write HDD it will take ca 3 hours but u have to wait and checking for error i will post some pics some i hope will help you

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/1614/14770099ga2.jpg

http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=14770099ga2.jpg

http://img239.imageshack.us/img239/2526/35680833oz9.jpg

http://img239.imageshack.us/my.php?image=35680833oz9.jpg

or open cmd console and start with cmd

http://www.imagehost.ro/viewer.php?img=11234653470e8bbd44f2d

http://www.imagehost.ro/pict/11234653470e8bbd44f2d.JPG