New computer - fdisk reading drive size incorrect

[biglaker]

HI,
I'm setting up a PC for my son. It's an MSI KT3 Ultra 2. It seems the bios is reading the WD drive correctly as an 80 Gb, but when I told fdisk to setup 1 partition, it displayed as 10,781 mb. What did I do wrong? I'm using a Win98 bootdisk with Fdisk. My plan was to create 4 logical drives and then load Win 2k after format. Is this a reasonable way to do this? Why is fdisk displaying the drive size wrong? Biglaker

[Midknyte]

did you try using the WD installation software? if you got an OEM drive, you should still be able to download the tools from the WD website.

fdisk can act funky on the larger drives. I've had problems where FDisk reported a 80 GB drive as 16GB.

[biglaker]

Thanks Midknyte,
I fiddled with the Western Digital tool and when it started asking me questions about if I was going to install XP or NT4.0, I just let it finish and went ahead and installed Win 2k. As I write this, Win 2k just finished loading and I'm formatting the other 3 partitions that I setup. Win 2k recognized the correct size. Dunno what happened with Fdisk.
:D :D :D
Biglaker

[Midknyte]

that's just fdisk showing its age. you could have just booted with the win2k cd and done your partitioning and formatting there.

[omega31]

There is an updated fdisk from MS that will show the correct size. Also an updated format.com at the bottom of the page.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q263044

You could also use freedos's fdisk:
http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/

[arthur888]

on hdd higher than 60gb the old fdisk versions only display the capacity above 60, maybe that explains. Although it displays incorrect information it works alright. Your disk will format as a 80gb even if you use the old fdisk. I don't know exactly if you can set 4 partitions by entering a percentage of the total drive space, but the newer version from microsoft will do fine anyway... so what am i talking about.. ;) :x