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Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : HD wrong size in setup, is data at risk?


FoolishDave
07-19-2000, 03:28 PM
Hi,

Have many times looked here for information, but this is my first post. The 2.1 gig Samsung hard drive went bad in one of the computers at my brother's business. I replaced it with a 15.4 gig Quantum lct10 drive, which seemed to autodetect okay in setup, but when I went to partition the drive only 4.3 gigs was seen by fdisk. Going back into the bios, I found that the drive was set up as 4.3 gigs. I went back through setup a number of times, but after every reboot the drive came up 4.3 gigs. The motherboard was an Asus sp97-xv, with a 233 mmx Pentium, 32 megs memory.

I'm assuming that this is a bios limitation, although it would make more sense to me if it was happening at 8.4 gigs, and that a bios upgrade might well fix it. But I'm not anxious to do that, considering that at this point the computer is working fine. My bro was wanting to get the computer back on line, so I partitioned and formatted it as a 4.3 gig drive. He's got twice as much space as he had before, and his computer works, so he's happy. But is his data safe?

I told him that I thought it probably was...at least as safe as data ever is on a hard drive. Am I right or wrong about this?

What would happen if the motherboard kicked, and this HD was connected to a new controller? Would it be able to access the existing partions? Or would it freak out?

Thanks

socalgal
07-19-2000, 08:03 PM
^

[This message has been edited by socalgal (edited 07-19-2000).]

grunt
07-19-2000, 08:27 PM
Dave, if you put the drive on a new board and it saw it as a 15gig, everything would be ok. Or, like you said, as safe as data can be on a hdd http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

Fdisk would see it as a 4.3gig primary DOS partition, and the rest as unused space (which is exactly what it is.)

Jeff7
07-20-2000, 06:06 PM
Just figured I'd ask - what happened to the 2.1GB hard drive? Is there any way I might be able to get a hold of it?

FoolishDave
07-21-2000, 01:55 PM
Actually, Jeff, there's a nephew involved, who will have to fool around with it to find out if it might be made to work for five more minutes, or do something with it. It would be easier to get a steak away from a Doberman...

Thanks, Grunt, for the reply. My brother will be reassured, I'm sure.