I am thinking of getting a second hard drive and an concerned that it may not be compatible with either my BIOS or winXP. I have heard that some BIOS and WINXP home ed may not see hard drives larger than 137G (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303013). How can I check out if my BIOS is compatible. I currently have a 120G hard drive and a Gateway 1.7GHz computer (about 3 years old).

Shouldn't be a problem, win xp should see all of the HD.

If you want to be sure, try and download the newest BOIS for you pc. If you can't find it, just get an ATA controler card. That will let you put in whatever size HD you want.

yeah I am with dInferno herem BIOS should see it no problem. Know as for Win it won't see it unless it is partitioned into 137gb partitions or less. But if you get the SP1 installed it will see every bit of it if you partition the whole drive.

The hard drive must also be NTFS.

Yes, true of course FAT 32 only supports aprox 32 gb partitions, and why use FAT 32 over NTFS, I mean NTFS fragments less, more stable, more secure, etc.

I only use NTFS myself, ever since I tried to format a drive with larger than 32gb partitions back in the day I never looked back to FAT 32, I would NTFS a floppy if I could.

I'm using FAT32 on 1 drive, which works just fine and NTFS on the other. For a home user the NTFS security doesn't mean much. I tend to use FAT32 over NTFS, coz it's compatibility is broader than the NTFS.

I do not think Win XP recognizes SATA hard drives until after SP1 is installed. Nothing to be concerned about if you are not using SATA.

Well, I just found out the largest drive compatible with my BIOS is 127Gig. Guess if I want a larger one I'll have to get an external drive- which I don't want to do.

Unfortunately, no room for a card

Not to stray off topic, but yes FAT can be more compatiable with older Win 9x OS's, but that does not make it better.

FAT proven to be quite reliable and is fairly immune to damage. When the system crashes, FAT can "misplace" disk space that was being allocated to a file.
Although it is simpler to manage a few larger volumes, FAT performance degrades with volume size. The distance between the directory and the data increases the disk movement, and larger allocation units waste space. FAT systems require the least memory and are the best choice on small machines.
FAT32 increases the number of bits used to address clusters and also reduces the size of each cluster. The result is that it can support larger disks (up to 2 terabytes) and better storage efficiency (less slack space).

NTFS has features to improve reliability, such as transaction logs to help recover from disk failures. For large applications, NTFS supports spanning volumes, which means files and directories can be spread out across several physical disks.