I think it's BIOS limitations Turp. I bought a couple of 200GB's a while back and had to load some utility on the PC so the PC saw more than 130'ish Gb. I remember reading that it was pretty common for even recent mobos not seeing more than that. Do a search on the h/d manufacturers web site, and you should find something.
This is the link I used for my Maxtor drives..
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...cGFnZT0x&p_li=
@ JAZ - Never realised you lost much disc space when you partitioned, are you sure you loose much percentage wise?