Need help with partitioning a new hard-drive

[Lackmusboy]

I´ve just bought a IBM Seagate 34GXP 20,5GB hard disk but I cannot seem to get it to work properly.
I have another computer (with an old Maxtor HD) as well so I tried putting the new one as slave and then used FDISK to partition it. The strange thing is that the size of the hard disk is 504MB instead of 20,5GB!!! What did I do wrong?

[thxmanu]

Your BIOS probably doesn't recognize that big of a drive. You either need to update your BIOS or if your new drive came with overlay software, use it.

[howste]

thxmanu nailed it. Older systems used to have a 540 MB limit in BIOS. Later, there was a 2GB limit, then 8GB. Most of these can be fixed by flashing a BIOS upgrade. If you can't upgrade your BIOS (or are scared to try), drive overlay software can be downloaded from the manufacturers website. Sometimes it comes on a floppy disk with the hard drive.

Good luck

Steve

[Lackmusboy]

Thanks a lot guys! Once you pointed out that it was the BIOS that was the trouble I downloaded a utility from IBM´s homepage which made my BIOS realize that my HD was in fact a 20,5-Gigger http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif