the last time I put a system and loaded win 98 I formatted a 80 g hard disc using a bootable floppy and ended up with a disc with 1 partition that is only 66g.
Im now building a p4 system for my nephew and dont want to end up with the same problem. I will be using a boot up floopy and windows 98 se
any help will be great

This may help:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044

The results of mskb 263044 would have resulted in a drive of just (80-64=) 16GB.

66GB is quite a strange value since there are no common barriers between 31.5 through 128 GB.

One has to wonder if the drive was correctly partitioned in the first place. If FDisk gets it wrong you could try FreeFdisk (http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/) or Ranish (http://www.ranish.com/part) or any utilities provided by the HDD manufacturer. BING (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/) can be got on trial and is a very versatile partition utility.

I would see how you go with partitioning and formatting the new drive and post back if you have problems - which should be even less likely with a modern motherboard BIOS.

You could also try booting to the Win98 installation CD and use it in place of a boot floppy diskette to do the fdisking and formatting.

thanks for the help I will try that. also the links you have pointed out. looks like the next option if it does go wrong.