Hard Drive Help!

[blue_midget192]

i have just bought a Hard Drive off Ebay, the guy said it was 4.3 gig, and the case concurs. however i formatted it on my Win 98 computer-which is the computer i will be using it on-and it only recognises 500 odd meg of it (503 to be exact) I tried to reformat it on my XP pc and it still wont have it. I was goning to try and Fdisk it in XP, but the 's have removed the dos support from Xp so i cant do that. Any one have any ideas of what to do?

[Dr Unne]

MS has anticipated this problem, and provided a simple 5-step solution involving booting from your XP install disk and possibly reconfiguring your BIOS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316505

Enjoy. Or you could download Knoppix and boot from it and use fdisk.

[blue_midget192]

MS has anticipated this problem, and provided a simple 5-step solution involving booting from your XP install disk and possibly reconfiguring your BIOS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316505

Enjoy. Or you could download Knoppix and boot from it and use fdisk.

Cheers if i do this, will it then work on my 98 PC?

[Baloki]

I suspect its more of a dodgy hard drive however you can format hard drives from within windows XP now, just right click My Computer, goto Administration (or something like that) and goto Disk Management.

[blue_midget192]

I suspect its more of a dodgy hard drive however you can format hard drives from within windows XP now, just right click My Computer, goto Administration (or something like that) and goto Disk Management.

I tried that thouhgt it had worked, my XP computer was showing 4.3 gig, i took it and put it in my 98 pc and it went back to only recognising 5.3 meg wots wrong

[Baloki]

You need to format it in FAT16

edit: not NTFS

[crono_logical]

FAT<b><u>32</u></b>. FAT16 doesn't support partitions over 2 GB. If it was NTFS, he wouldn't even see the partition, let alone 5.3 MB.

I'd suggest deleting all partitions and fdisking it in the Win98 machine and not keep swapping it around - you might find the cause of the problem more easily that way.

Check the jumpers on the drive before putting it in the machine. Older drives (and some new ones still) might have jumpers to clip the drive to a limited size, and you might need to remove that. When you run fdisk, make sure you say Yes when it asks if you want to enable support for drives larger than 512 MB.

In a highly unlikely scenario though, it might be the BIOS causing this, either due to you having configured it wrong for the drive, or if your machine is very old, the BIOS simply doesn't support drives over roughly 0.5GB. This requires flashing the BIOS to fix, and not something I'd recommend to most users unless they know exactly what they're doing. How old is the computer running Win98?

[blue_midget192]

FAT<b><u>32</u></b>. FAT16 doesn't support partitions over 2 GB. If it was NTFS, he wouldn't even see the partition, let alone 5.3 MB.

I'd suggest deleting all partitions and fdisking it in the Win98 machine and not keep swapping it around - you might find the cause of the problem more easily that way.

Check the jumpers on the drive before putting it in the machine. Older drives (and some new ones still) might have jumpers to clip the drive to a limited size, and you might need to remove that. When you run fdisk, make sure you say Yes when it asks if you want to enable support for drives larger than 512 MB.

In a highly unlikely scenario though, it might be the BIOS causing this, either due to you having configured it wrong for the drive, or if your machine is very old, the BIOS simply doesn't support drives over roughly 0.5GB. This requires flashing the BIOS to fix, and not something I'd recommend to most users unless they know exactly what they're doing. How old is the computer running Win98?

yup yup, i did it at FAT 32 and I tried in the first palce to fdsik it on my 98 pc, deleted the partion, repartioned it taking 100% of the drive space and still only 503mb. And it did not show me the large drive support screan.

The only jumpers i'v seen on the drive are for slecting it as a master/slave etc and cable select-which is what i'v set it on.

The computer...old...hmm, well its a 166Mhz (cyrix) processor. it's prity old. And i'v checked the bios settings against the drive case parameters and the bios is set to the same.

[Baloki]

FAT<b><u>32</u></b>. FAT16 doesn't support partitions over 2 GB. If it was NTFS, he wouldn't even see the partition, let alone 5.3 MB.

I'm sure 98 only let you use Fat16 while 98SE let you use FAT32...

[crono_logical]

Did you remember to delete any non-MSDOS partitions when in fdisk?

Also, when you boot the machine, how big does the BIOS report the drive to be? You might need to go into the CMOS to check this. Any drive settings in there would be helpful too e.g. if it's set to auto-detect, and the cylinder/head/sector counts if it shows them (basically everything on the appropriate screen).

If it's not set to auto-detect, you could try enabling that (dunno if a machine as old as yours will do it though), since manually inputting the cylinder/head/sector counts can limit the space seen on a drive - I can't remember if it limits to ~500 MB or 2 GB, but that might be the problem there.

[blue_midget192]

Did you remember to delete any non-MSDOS partitions when in fdisk?

Also, when you boot the machine, how big does the BIOS report the drive to be? You might need to go into the CMOS to check this. Any drive settings in there would be helpful too e.g. if it's set to auto-detect, and the cylinder/head/sector counts if it shows them (basically everything on the appropriate screen).

If it's not set to auto-detect, you could try enabling that (dunno if a machine as old as yours will do it though), since manually inputting the cylinder/head/sector counts can limit the space seen on a drive - I can't remember if it limits to ~500 MB or 2 GB, but that might be the problem there.

yup deleted the non-dos partition that was there. the bios settings are set to auto, but the settings are exactly the same as the ones on the hard drive itself, including the size of drive. (if you want the actual specs i can get them) i have also tried putting in the cylinders etc myself and it still aint working.

[o_O]

I'm sure 98 only let you use Fat16 while 98SE let you use FAT32...

No, 98 supports FAT32 partitions.
98 can also recognise NTFS partitions, provided you have <a href="http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml">NTFS drivers</a> for it.

[crono_logical]

Win95 OSR2 was the earliest Windows that came with FAT32 support.

yup deleted the non-dos partition that was there. the bios settings are set to auto, but the settings are exactly the same as the ones on the hard drive itself, including the size of drive. (if you want the actual specs i can get them) i have also tried putting in the cylinders etc myself and it still aint working.

It'd be nice to see the exact values, although I'm more certain now that it is a BIOS limit you're seeing, and you need to upgrade/flash your BIOS to get around this (not for the faint-hearted - if it fails, goodbye motherboard ). You'll have to go to the manufacturer's website for the motherboard and choose the appropriate flashing tools and BIOS image.