My father recently installed a new hard drive on his computer. After he installed his OS (win 98) it will only recognize 2 gigs, it is a 20 gig. I am sure there is some way of having the OS see the entire drive. Does anyone know how to do this or did he miss a step in the setup of the hard drive or OS?

Did you enable large disk support when you did FDISK? Did you put only one partition?

My father says that he used some sort of recovery disk that came with his computer to install the hard drive? I am not sure of the exact procedure that was used.

Do you mean recovery disk to install the Operating System?

Ask him what exactly he did before he installed the OS. It would be easier to give a more definate answer. I would hate to tell you to FDISK/Format if it's already been done. It's not a complicated process, but, you will lose everything on your HD. I'm not saying that's the answer, I just need more info before I start asking if you enabled it, used FAT32 etc.
Does your BIOS support the larger drive?



[This message has been edited by jinn (edited 06-18-2001).]

Using a restore disk...is this perhaps a different hard drive than the one that was originally in the computer? If so chances are it could have been originally manufactured with a 2GB hard drive and that's all it will set it up for.

Otherwise, I'm afraid Fdisk may be necessary, for reasons mentioned above. If large disk support, otherwise known as FAT32, was not enabled, then it's running FAT 16 which only recognizes 2GB. The PC Guide has pretty good instructions for using fdisk Here (http://www.pcguide.com/proc/setup/hdd.htm)

The other option would be to try a program like Partition Magic, which I've heard is pretty good at repartitioning without losing data.

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