shrinking hard disc???? [Archive] - The PC Guide Discussion Forums

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liamkincaid25

01-10-2002, 10:26 PM

i bought a fujitsu hard disc. it is of 6.4gb. i have partitioned and formated it twice using fdisk. when i install win 98 and check the size of the disc it is always of only 2GB. how can i correct this. fat 32 is being used y enable large disc support. anyone can help? thank you

wiltrot

01-10-2002, 10:32 PM

Go into the BIOS and change the IDE settings to auto

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What's up with that?

bassman

01-10-2002, 10:34 PM

Hi Liam,
Go into BIOS and see what the mode for this drive is set to. (Normal,LBA,Large,...)
Also, how about some more system info. How old is this machine, mobo make/model,...
When you go thru the Fdisk routine and select "Large disk support", after partitioning, use option 4 and see what it reports for size. Should read approximatly 6000Mgb.
Good luck http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/cool.gif

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liamkincaid25

01-11-2002, 10:16 AM

thank you Wiltrot , thanks Bassman
my system is
jabil kadoka mb , 750 mhz amd athlon thunderbird , 256 mb ram , 300 watts power supply , savage 2000 agp card
the mb is new , the disc is used. i have used this board to format and partition other discs with no problems. the settings are set to autodetect and LBA.
any further advice much appreciated

ski

01-11-2002, 01:48 PM

The hard drive may have a 3rd party utility, like Disk Manager or EZ Drive, installed on it because it was in an older computer where the BIOS did not have LBA and it could not be flashed. And EZ Drive does limit the max single partition size to 2GB.
Since these utilities are embedded in the master boot record, formatting will not remove them. You must remove them with fdisk.exe. But doing this will also remove the contents of the HD, so back up any critical files.

Start with the Windows boot floppy inserted(first make sure it has fdisk.exe on it), select 'Start Without CD-ROM Support', press Enter, type fdisk /mbr at the A prompt, press Enter, restart with the boot floppy still inserted, run fdisk to remove the non-dos partition(s), repartition, and reformat.

Randy_tx

01-11-2002, 08:59 PM

Maybe I missed something, but if I read your post correctly, you DID Fdisk the drive already.....but....did you DELETE the partitions and then re-create them prior to formatting? Also, unless the BIOS sees the drive as a 6.4 gig HD, there will be no way for it to format to 6.4 gig. without a 3rd party utility...I assume it does see it as a 6.4 gig...right? If you have done all of the above and it still formats to a 2 gig HD then you are not using the Win 98 version of Fdisk [it actually came out with win95 verB] which supports larger hard drives.

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XP didn't save Me !

liamkincaid25

01-11-2002, 10:05 PM

thank you for all your time and help. i solved the problem . somehow using this board i can not fdisk partition and format a hd with the jumper cabs on. i took off the jumper cabs and started all the process again and at last the hd shows the 6.5gb it posses.
is there a reason for this problems? i have not found an answer to this problem ( needing to take the jumpers to partiton and format a drive)

liamkincaid25

01-12-2002, 10:01 AM

tHANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR HELP!!. i solved the problem in the most atypical way. i did fdisk and partitoned the disk after deleting the original partition first. i just remembered that with this mb the first timee i used it i had some problems with a hd. somehow if you want to format and partition a disk you need to do it WITHOUT the jumpers cap. i did this and evrything went ok. is there a reason for this? in other machines i have partitioned and formatted disk with the jumpers cab on with no problem. THANK YOU all for your time help and concern

liamkincaid25

01-12-2002, 10:03 AM