80Gb hard drive only recognized as 2Gb

[handman]

I recently purchased and installed a Western Digital 80 Gb hard drive in my machine, and what i ended up with was a 2 Gb hard drive. I know older motherboards can be the problem, I have an Asus CUV4X ( I dont think its the problem). I am currently running a 40 Gb western digital as the master. I have checked the jumpers and insured that the drives were connected corretly on the ribbon. I have come up with many potential cuases, non of them being the actual cuase. If you could throw out any ideas I would be greatfull, some of my system specs are below:

Windows XP Professional
DVD-ROM (Sony)
CD burner (Aopen)
40Gb western digital Hard drive
Motherboard: Asus CUV4X

If you need any additional info just let me know

Thank You

Handman:r

[Bovon]

Did you let the bios autodetec the 80 gig drive?..has it been fdisked and formatted?..if it was fdisked with just FAT, then that may be why it is only being seen as 2 gig. FAT32 needs to be chosen in fdisk, actually...it dosn't say FAT32, I believe it says large disk.

80 gig drives are relatively new, and an older bios may not see that much, but it certainly should see more than 2 gig.

[bob05]

yeah like Bovon said what did you format it with? Though most old BIOS's limit is 32 gb:(

[SPEEDO]

Like Bovon said the first thing is to check your bios and see if it detected it correctly...;)

Then if you want to use FAT32 you need to fdisk and format using a Win98 bootdisk to be able to use the full size of your drive.

If you try to partition off of the XP CD it will only give you 32 gig.

If you are going to use NTFS it will recognize up to 2 TB

SPEEDO

[handman]

Sorry I didnt provide more info in my last post, I was really tired and was just about to go to bed. I have already used fdisk to make it into a fat32 file system, and it didnt work. I did this both in dos with a windows startup disk, and within the provided XP utility. Both of these methods yielded the same 2 Gb hard drive. I've never had this problem before when installing Hard drives, could it be that the drive was damaged?

I have noticed that the maodel my computer recognizes is different from the model of the drive. This might be the porblem, but i cannot seem to solve it.

thatnks for all the help though :cool:

Handman :r

[smelanson]

If the BIOS is not detecting it correctly you may want to try a drive overlay and turn the HD to auto detect. Wd's drive overlay is called EZ-install, http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

[SPEEDO]

Go here (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp) and download the diagnostic program and write zeros to this new drive.

Then go here (http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html) and download a Win98 Boot Disk.

Fdisk and partition with this new downloaded startup disk.

He is already using a 40 gig drive so his bios should see more than 2 gig.

Only he won't tell us what the bios reads...:confused:

[G Ray88]

Handyman, you might want to upgrade your BIOS, that way your bios would detect the large HD on its own. Check at www.motherboards.org and www.wimsbios.com Good Luck:)

[buffguns]

Just wanted you all to know, about 3 mos ago, I got a new box, 1.3 G on a new biostar mobo, newest and latest drivers, Via, and reflashed the bios with the newest and greatest. During the POST my system autodetects 2.1 GB drives for both my drives.

The OS is ME, and it finds and uses all 30GB and 18GB of my drives.

I have adapted to and adopted the resolve: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Does your OS recognize the true size of the drive?

If so, see above!

[handman]

Thanks for the help, I hope it will solve my problem. Unfortunatley I won't be able to try again till sunday night :mad: .
I hate busy weekends! Thanks again for all the help:D .

Handman:r

[handman]

Well i update my bios and the problem remained, I also tied the overlay program and it failed to provide any positive results. Im probably just going to return the drive :mad:

Thanks again for all the help

Handman

[G Ray88]

Handyman, before returning the HD I would recheck the jumpers again, most drives have a size limitation jumper that can be used, so that the drive would work in a older computer system make sure that it is not jumped, maybe that might help. Good Luck:cool: