Hard drive formatting problem.

[razmataz]

I have a problem in formatting my IBM 22 gb 372200 Hard drive. I am only able to format a 2gb partition. I initially had over 19gb of files and a w2000 os contained on this disk, but unfortunately that became unrecoverable due to a possible partitioning error of mine (changing from a fat 32 partition type to fat or fat 16, as I have been told). I've tried to format the entire drive (as a slave) using a win 98 and w2000 boot disk, but it has not worked. The bios itself only states the drive as having 2113 mb. If it of any use to anyone the the Award bios setup utility also gives the following information for this Primary Slave drive:
TYPE [AUTO]
CYLINDER [ 257]
HEAD [257]
SECTOR [63]
CHS CAPACITY [2113MB]
MAXIMUM LBA CAPACITY [2113MB]
I hope this information helps. I really hope my drive isn't dead. This is very worrying!Any suggestions, please?

[S.D.Willie]

try setting the hard drive to auto in bios and do an FDISK and delete the non dos partition. maybe you used NTFS with win2k and that is not letting you format it because it doesnt see it. hope this helps.

SD

[turbo]

This may be obvious but did you sellect large disk support when you ran fdisk. Suggest you run it again with Large disk support.
Delete all dos and no dos first so you can start with aclean slate. Hope it helps

turbo ;-]

[razmataz]

Thanks for your suggestions SD and Turbo. Sorry for taking such a long time getting back but I've been away a few days. I've tried both of your suggestions but the drive continues to state only 2115mb in bios. Upon deleting the primary partition of the drive, I then discover that I am unable to use the option to delete all non dos partitions. In fact, fdisk states there are no other partitions on the drive ? Are there any further suggestions I could possibly try, perhaps a particular utility? I hope you can help.

[Bovon]

Any chance this drive had/has a disk manager on it?...if so, that may need to be uninstalled. Are you trying the fdisk/format from a diskette from DOS, or Windows?...