HD formatting too small

[nachtgeist]

Howdy,

To cut to the chase, I had to fdisk my C drive yesterday. <sounds of moaning and shrieking ensue> Anyway, after deleting the Active DOS partition from within FDISK, when I chose to Create a Primary DOS Partition, my 1.2 Gig drive is only allowed the "maximum" space of 507 megs.
Somewhere in the vague recesses of my memory I recall seeing this explained somewhere, but I can't remember where it was. If anyone has pointers I'd be much obleeged. Thanks!

[lost1]

Well, at least I'm not the only one with this problem! I've got a PackardBell 486 w/Win95 that I use for word processing that does the same thing. I tried to add a 4.3GB Quantum as a second drive & BIOS only sees 540MB. ARRGH! Maybe someone can help us both...

[Underclocked]

You have no support for large disks on your boards. Need to get your drive makers's program to enable full use of the drives on such boards. In the case of Quantum it would be Ontrack Disk Manager® DiskGo! version 2.50
available here http://www.quantum.com/support/csr/software/csr_software.htm
And each one should have something similar.

[lost1]

Thanks for the reply, Underclocked. I tried Ontrack about a month ago, got it installed and it crashed. This rendered the entire system unusable as the program is loaded into BIOS as soon as the computer boots up. Couldn't get it off the disk even with a full format! Luckily, Quantum has an uninstall program at their website which allows recovery when this happens. Guess I'll just have to make do with the old half gig...
Thanks again.

[BRUCE45]

You have to go into bios setup. Highlight
your hard drive and hit enter. go to IDE
translation mode and hit enter. Change
the setting to logical block. Save changes
and restart. You will have to reformat
though. <sorry>

[nachtgeist]

DING! And the prize goes to bruce. I did some checking around after posting that question and indeed it appears I needed to go into the BIOS setup and change the drive type to LBA (Logical Block Addressing). Though one strange thing that came of this is that it ended up giving me only a bit over 3800 megs on a 4000.1 GB drive. Oh well, no complaints here; I have a 27 GB 7200 rpm drive on the way. Yeah, I know, I got carried away. /forum/wink.gif