It appears that my bios is limiting me to a total of 40gigs. I have been attempting to add a 80gig drive as a slave to the system in my sig.

The bios reports the first hd as 30,000mb(approx)and the second hd as 80gb. It is supposed to report in mb's which would be approx 80,000.
I have updated the bios to the F3 version which is the newest.
I have attempted to set the second drive as an extended partition with the disk management tools in w2k. It will not let me create more than a 10gig partition.
I also tried the Datasaver utility from Western Digital (the 80gig manufacturer) to set it up as additional storage. That program goes thru the motions and appears to complete without errors, however, the drive is not recognized by win98, w2k or by Norton Ghost.
As a further test, I created a 2gig partition with w2k and attempted to create another partition. It would only let me create another 8gig partition, which would have given me a total of 40gig and leaving the last 70gig unavailable. In this case, the 2 and the 8gig partitions are now recognized in win98, w2k and Ghost.

I really believe it is a bios issue but don't know what else I can do to get this 80gig drive to be recognized properly.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

First off, how is the drive setup (physical setup)...slave on primary channel?

What is the jumper configuration?

What kind of cable, etc?

MJC - they are set up as master(30gig) and slave(80gig) with jumpers accordingly on a 40 pin cable , master at the end on primary IDE0. I believe that is right by the bios recognizing them properly.
I should point out that the w2k disk management properties does show the full 80gig but it will not format the full amount - only 10gigs - without an error to the effect that there is not enough room. I also tried with fdisk which only saw 10gig from the start and actually led me to the conclusion that the bios was imposing the 40 gig limit.
I will try to format it with fdisk as if it were a clean boot, ie. with only the 80gig in on the end of the ide cable, if you guys think that might let me format the whole drive.

It doesnt seem to be BIOS related if W2K can see the whole 80GB (presumably as a mixture of partitions and unallocated space).

After you have fdisked, if formatting FAT with Win2K, there is a maximum size-limit of 32GB imposed by Win2K and XP (only M$ knows why) so if you want a single 80gig partition, either partition it in NTFS if using W2K's disk manager, or use another "formatter" altogether.

paul,

I am not wanting to go to anything other than fat32 so that i can use win98 as a recognized backup partition. If I formated in NTFS, w98 and Norton Ghost will not know that exists.

Just try the Win2K Disk Manager first. Delete all the partitions on the 80 gig and then try to create three new partitions 30, 25 and 25 GB in size. If this works you know that there is definitely no bios problem.

You could then (or instead) use a Win98 startup disk to fdisk (just make sure you fdisk the correct drive - and choose to enable large drives) and to reboot and then to format a single 80 GB partition as FAT32. Win2K can see and use larger FAT32 partitions - it just cant create them with its own software.

Other partition managers such as Partition Magic or Ranish would also be able to prepare the partition for you.

If by any chance the partition tables have and remain corrupted by the various attempts used so far then wipe the drive with the maker's utilities or using WipeOut (http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html) and then start over.

If you are at all worried about fdisking or wipeouting the wrong drive then disconnect the master while you do this from the boot floppy diskette(s).

Paul, fdisk only recognizes it as 10 gig. I can try removing my 30gig drive and run fdisk. I suspect that it will only see it as 40gig drive.

W2k may see it as 80 but will only let me format 10 which gives me a total of 40. I think w2k is not actually seeing 80gig but rather reading that it is an 80gig drive from a header or such at the beginning of the drive. I can also try using the w2k cd when I have the other drive removed and see if I can then use it all or just 40.

Do you think it would make a difference if both drives were changed to cable select jumpers?

I can also try putting the 80 on ide1 alone as master and see if I can then partition and format.

Any particular order I should try these options or just go for it?

I may have found a workaround. I just tried my MaxBlast software and it appears to have worked on the new Western Digital drive. The 30gig drive is a Maxtor. So far so good anyway!:)

Update: Does Norton Ghost 2001 have a size limitation? I partitioned the new drive with 2 - 1 gig partitions (for possible future OS installs) and 3 - 26 gig partitions for my backups. Ghost does not show any of the 26 gig partitions, only the 2 - 1 gig partitions.

What did you use to partition and format them; and what format was used?

Paul, I used the Maxblast program to do the partitioning and made all the partitions Fat32. Ghost runs in dos and I seem to recall something about an 8gig limit in dos, maybe there is something like that that is preventing Ghost from seeing the larger partitions. I had a neighbor who gave me a 15gig hd once because all they could ever use was around 8gigs and thought it was a bad hd. I never had any problems with using the full 15gigs, altho I created a few partitions on it and all were less than 8gig. I seem to recall that they were trying to set it up as 1 large partition on an ME machine.
I guess I can try several different sizes of partitions and see where Ghost craps out. Then I would be stuck with spanning across partitions with my backup images.
This has sure put a bit of a bug in my original backup plans!!

Well, it's too nice of a day to be in front of the box so, I'll check back in tonite.

I think that the 8GB value may be to do with the fact that the boot partition for Windows 9x, ME and XP should START before the 8GB mark (or before the 2GB value for DOS). The actual partitions for the versions of Windows can be larger than 8GB but the boot partition must start prior to reaching the 8GB mark from the beginning of the drive.

On imaging/partitioning software it is not uncommon to see lines marking the 2 and 8 GB marks just to emphasise these limits.

I'm not familiar with Ghost but Drive Image would have no problems with partitions of that size. I would imagine that wouldn't be an intrinsic problem for Ghost either.

1) There is no such thing as a 40 GB HD limit in bios - there are known barriers at 32 GB and 128 GB. A limit of 32 GB means that you would have a 32 GB limit on each physical drive (2 drives = 64 GB) not a total limit of 32 GB.

2) A drive must be partitioned AND FORMATTED before it is recognized and can be used by the OS.

3) If you are unable to partition all the space on this drive, it may be that there is a problem with the drive (do manufacturer diagnostics), or with the way it is jumpered. Western Digital drives have a jumper setting for a single drive on the cable, and a different setting for a master slave combination on a cable.

Someone else recommended placing the new drive as a single drive on IDE 1. This is good advice while you are trying to get it working (recognized, partitioned and formatted).

4) 1 GB isn't enough space for any known operating system. There must also be space on the partition for applications associated with that OS, for a Windows cache, and for a printer buffer. I would never allot less than 8GB for an OS partition and I usually like 16GB.

5) Use Western Digital's installation software to partition the new drive. That will allow you to make the partitions any size (1-80 GB).

Sandman,

1) I was limited to 40gig total available at the start of this exercise.

2) Duh !

3) As you should have noticed, I have been able to partition and have all of the new hard drive partitions recognized by both Win98 and W2k. To verify this, I have copied/pasted files to all of the additional partitions and thru windows explorer have also deleted files from all of the partitions in both OS's. I have also installed programs to the additional partitions and they have worked fine.

4)BS !! I have instaled win98se on 500mb harddrives with a couple of small programs as well. Win98se can be installed in less than 200mb. Less than 4 years ago there were lots of systems around with w98se and several programs on them with 2gig harddrives. Most of them had room for at least a gig of data after the programs. Things have changed as storage space has become so cheap and easily available. In the future, I would anticipate creating partitions such that the first would only have the operating system and relevant hardware and motherboard drivers, the 2nd would be significantly larger and would be where all of the programs other than OS would be installed. After that, I would create seperate partitions for my data files, ie: text, music, pictures, etc. with space set accordingly.

5) That is exactly what I did initially - used WDs software to set the 80gig harddrive as completely additional storage space.

I appreciate your thoughts and thank you for the response. I am certainly not an expert as most of the people here but, I probably have read enough and only really understood enough to be a danger to myself !!:D

Ummm...let's not turn this into a fracas...

On the one hand, gwallen is correct, no 40GB BIOS limit exists. On the other hand, you seem to have encountered a 40GB limit of some sort...probably not BIOS, that system should handle the 80GB drive. The limit seems to be around 8GB for that particular drive, unless I misunderstood something. For 40GB total.

Installing almost any version of Windows is certainly possible on a 1GB partition, although not particularly advisable with XP. I'm one of those hordes of people who had win98 installed on 2GB drives just a couple of years ago, and have installed it on a 340MB drive, with room for a few applications. That didn't leave much breathing room, but 1GB is enough. I think my win98 machine with a number of applications and a couple of decent size games is barely topping 2GB right now...All file storage is on other partitions.

OK a couple of things that might be worth trying. Get an 80 conductor cable, and set both drives to Cable Select. Try the 80GB drive by itself, jumpered Cable Select, on the 80 conductor cable. Try it jumpered to Master as well, but 80 conductor cables seem to work best on Cable Select. Go into BIOS, save changes and exit, not changing anything. While in BIOS make sure it identifies the 80GB drive correctly. Also make sure it doesn't show any garbage characters either in BIOS or in the boot screens.

I should point out that the w2k disk management properties does show the full 80gig

It was this comment that made me think this is (a) not bios related and (b) probably partitioning/formatting gone astray or (c) partition table corruption within the mbr.

That was my logic anyways.

Oh. I thought we were trying to figure out why your 80 GB drive only has 8 GB of usable space. My point is that the drive is not limited by any known barrier. You should be able to use the entire 80 GB.

If you are unable to do so, then there is a problem - either a bad hard drive, incorrect jumpers, or a misadventure in partitioning and formatting. Until you solve that problem there is no point in loading OSes and programs. All that work will be lost.

On size of the OS partition - I install all programs associated with a particular OS on the same partition as the OS. That's where they want to go anyway. When I have to redo the operating system, all of the programs associated with that OS need to be reinstalled. So by reformatting the OS partition I wipe clean everything that needs to be redone. All data is preserved on a separate partition. My Win98 computer is currently using 12 of 16 GB on its OS partition - it might be time to clean it up though.

My Win XP partition has 4 GB used but I don't have many programs installed yet.

Good morning!!

Here is how things are now:
Bios sees both drives: it shows one as 30,### mb and the other as 80gb (which I thought should have been reported as 80,### mb)
I was able to partition with Maxblast3 (Maxtor hd setup software).
There are 5 partitions, 1,1,26,26,26.
They are all recognized and useable by both w98 and w2k.
Only the first 2 - 1gig partitions and all of the original 30gig harddrive partitions appear in Ghost. (Ghost does not see the 3 - 26gig partitions).

History:
When I had attempted to use either fdisk or w2k disk management, there was only the first 10 gigs of the new 80gig drive showing up as being available for partitioning. Although w2k 'saw' it as an 80gig drive, it would not let me use more than 10. That 10 plus the original 30 led me to the 40gig limit.

Future:
I will run fdisk again and see what it sees now.

As to the partition sizing question, I was under the impression from various posts over the last year or so, that it was generally agreed that the OS should be on the first partition with programs on another and data on others. That is why I intended to set my machines up that way but was wanting to backup what I have now just in case I need to refer back to what I have now. I know there are some here that prefer just one huge partition and others like two partitions with only dat on the second. I was looking to setup my system such that if a problem did arise, I would likely only have to restore a small portion and not the entire drive. Imaging with Ghost has worked for me in the past and that is why I was wanting to use it in this senario.

TaTa for now :) :)

You might try uninstalling Ghost then reinstalling it - to see if it recognizes the 26 GB partitions.

I think Gwallen is on to something.
..and all of the original 30gig harddrive partitions appear in Ghost

I now seem to remember that Ghost saves the previous configurations it has been involved with and then refers to these rather than reading the information and refreshing it dynamically - which DriveImage would always do for example.

Now a wee bell is ringing that someone else had a very similar problem once before.

1) Zero out the drive
2) Install the drive as the primary master.
3) Use an 80 wire cable
4) Use the MaxBlast Software to PARTITION AND FORMAT the drive. Have the O/S CD handy. This means DO NOT use format or fdisk.
5) The drive should be ready to boot.
6) Install the OS
7) Install all your programs
8) Install Ghost

All that being said, you have to be carefull with drive letters since the letters may be different in Win98 than win XP or WIN2K, as Win98 will not see any partitions set up as NTFS.

I would suspect that your problem lies in one of three areas.

A) A problem with 2 drives that have a primary bootable partition.
B) A problem with missing partitions that are NTFS when booting
with WIN98
C) A defective drive.

If you follow my steps, you will eliminate problems A&B. If the drive still will not format, I would contact Maxtor tech support for their help. They may have seen this problem before. I'm not an expert on Dual booting and others will correct me if I'm wrong, but you would have to install WIN98 first and Win2k or XP afterwards.

When things go wrong, I find it's better to not try to untangle things and just start over from scratch and see what happens. MaxBlast should handle all of the formatting and partitioning without any problem.

FYI, Ghost runs from a boot floppy in DOS.

One question.

What is the advantage/reason/necessity for using a 80 wire ide cable in this situation?:confused:

Because the newer drives require the 80 wire 40 pin connectors in order to function properly. Since your drive is not working, this is the obvious step 1 troubleshooting step.

I think all is OK now.