windows will not recognize my hard drive size

[fatty]

I installed a new 10 GB hard drive in my pc that had an early version of windows 95, which will only recognize 1gb of the hard drive and since then I've upgraded to windows ME. Is there something that I can do to allow me to use the whole 10 GB thanks!

[Budfred]

Welcome to PCGuide!

I suspect that you will need to repartition the drive which means you may have to reformat and reinstall. Others here will know more than I do. You may be able to use partitioning software to work with the existing setup, but I haven't done that, so I don't know for sure. If it were me, I would probably take the opportunity to back up my data, zero out the hard drive and reinstall everything. Check back for more informed answers to come.

Budfred

[Skelly]

Same thing happened to a mate of mine, i asked another friend and he said to update the BIOS

[DarrylDWoods]

fatty:

Run fdisk anew and enable large disk support.

Best wishes

[Sylvander]

Hello fatty

Go into your BIOS "setup" program "Standard CMOS Setup" "Hard Disks" "Type" and set all your drives [Primary/Secondary, Master/Slave] to "auto" as follows:

Primary Master : auto
Primary Slave : auto
Secondary Master : auto
Secondary Slave : auto

This "Dynamically Auto-Detects" your drives at startup, correctly SETS YOUR DRIVE PARAMETERS and displays the results of the detection on-screen so you can see all is well.

At present your HARD DISK DRIVE PARAMETERS are [probably] set for the smaller old HDD so your PC is being told you only have an old, small drive in place so it's only [capable of] using that portion of the larger drive.
Using the auto setting will mean any arrangement of jumper settings, IDE connections, drive size [and other characteristics] you use will be detected and catered for.
You could use both your new and old drives, the new as primary master and the old as primary slave. It can be extremely useful to have two physically separate drives.

If you have an older BIOS which cannot cope with large drives things get tricky. The BIOS will be unable to cope with partitions greater than 2GB. I can't remember how this comes about but possibly when you try to partition or when you install/re-install Windows your partitions will be limited to 2GB. If you flash upgrade your BIOS [hazardous but a better solution if it goes well] or install "Drive Overlay Software" [much easier to do, works fine but has some drawbacks] you will be able to use one big partition.
Using big partitions is not such a smart strategy however.
If you go for 32 bit FAT, [AND SMALLER PARTITIONS (5GB)] you get smaller "clusters", much more efficient use of HDD space with very little "slack" [wasted space] on the drive [you get much more useful space, more on it]. The smaller the partition the smaller the clusters, the more efficient the use. The down side of 32 bit FAT and a big partition is that it results in a huge "File Allocation Table" that can occupy MegaBytes and the drive takes hours to defragment. If you use bigger partitions you still get the disadvantages above but bigger clusters and less efficient use of space.

I'd recommend you try "Drive Overlay Software" first.