Listen up, techie people of the intarwebs.

I just got a new Seagate 200Gb drive, installed it and turned on my compy. Initially, there were some problems with it so I updated my BIOS and something to do with Dell's application accelerator or something so now, instead of showing me that the drive only has 137Gb, it tells me it has 187.

Fine. I can deal with 187Gb, if you have any suggestions to get my compy to recognize that it should be 200, be my guest. My real problem is that when I try to format it I get a little error message that tells me that Windows can't format the drive.

What do I do?

Hard drives are usually advertised at higher volumes than they actually are - hard drive manufacturers tend to use 1 KB = 1000 bytes, whereas Windows/RAM/Cache/etc uses 1 KB = 1024 bytes, so there are slight differences. If Windows is installed on the 200GB drive, you won't be able to format it from Windows, you'll need to use Windows setup.

Windows is installed elsewhere.

As Frogboy said, hardware manufacturers use the factor 1000, instead of the common 1024 (common when speaking about computers).

For example my Samsung SP1614C has "160 GB", which would be 171,798,691,840 bytes.
However it has: 160,038,907,904 bytes -> 149 GB

Nothing you can do about it since every manufacturer does this, as far as I know.

Thanks, I figured that bit out. My real problem was getting the damn thing to format which, if anyone is interested, just took some messing around with the BIOS, altering some registry value, and updating Intel's Application Accelerator...actually, I don't know why I said "just," that was a lot of work.