I am trying to partition this brand new maxtor 120 GB, it it shows only about 52 GB available on the entire disk. Any ideas? I noticed that it came with the ULTRA ATA/133 PCI card...I did not install the card, is this the reason? What does this card do?

Generally you only need the card if you don't have any IDE ports to install it on. If you paid a good price and got the card as well, that is a good thing. The card would probably run about $30 or $40...

Did you use the software from Maxtor to install it? It may be more likely to set it up for full use. You can also run the diagnostics to make sure there isn't actually something wrong with the drive.

You might need the card if you have an older motherboard that can't handle large drives and that doesn't have a BIOS update available to correct this.

The problem is with Windows 98 and 98SE. Fdisk has trouble recognizing the capacity of drives over 64GB:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=X5kGjTQg&p_lva=&p_faqid=236&p_created=1014857672&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MzEmc F9jYXRfbHZsMT04MSZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=

Use the Maxtor installation software to install the HD as Budfred has suggested.

The card will allow a data rate of 133 MB/sec. Older motherboards may not be able to attain a rate higher than 33, 66, or 100 MB/sec. The card may also allow you to have a larger drive (more GB) than your bios will allow.

Also make sure you use an 80 conductor IDE data cable.

Hello Guys,

Thank you for your answers....I did install the PCI card, I used the 80 pin cable AND I used the Maxtor installation CD and everything worked fine, the drive is used to its fullest capacity. Interestingly enough, using FDISK, somehow does not work with these gigantic drives, I was just curious if anyone had run into this problem before?