View Full Version : Again, lost gbs on new hard drives
whoops, can tell I'm a first timer. I bought a pre-system and installed a new 2.1 gb hard drive. When I look in, it shows that I only have 503mb of storage. I installed an exactly the same second 2.1 gb hard drive and it shows that one only has 503mb also. They both came pre-loaded with Windows 98. I deleted it from the slave hard drive. I keep running out of storage space and have to keep cleaning up my c drive of temporary files. My son, the "computer kid" can't figure out how to get the rest of the storage recognized. He even asked some "computer wizard" in a chat room he is always in, and still nothing. Help me! I'm afraid to download anything.
Originally posted by camp:
whoops, can tell I'm a first timer. I bought a pre-system and installed a new 2.1 gb hard drive.
Does "pre-system" mean an older system? How old is it?
When I look in, it shows that I only have 503mb of storage. I installed an exactly the same second 2.1 gb hard drive and it shows that one only has 503mb also. They both came pre-loaded with Windows 98. I deleted it from the slave hard drive. I keep running out of storage space and have to keep cleaning up my c drive of temporary files. My son, the "computer kid" can't figure out how to get the rest of the storage recognized. He even asked some "computer wizard" in a chat room he is always in, and still nothing. Help me! I'm afraid to download anything.
This sounds like a classic hard disk barrier, but would need to know the exact hardware in the system and its age to be sure. See here for more on what this is all about: http://www.PCGuide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm
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Charles M. Kozierok
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My system is brand new, direct from the maufacturer. All I had to do was install a processor, hard drive, and memory. My two new hard drives are 2.1 gb Western Digital Caviars. I have a pc-100 sdram 168 pin dimm chip and a amd-k6-2 400mhz processor. There is no brand name on the system. The box says M599LMR. I installed a Modem Blaster modem in it. All of the set-up numbers automatically came up right when we turned it on and went into set it up. My son says it has something to do with the partitions (I don't think I spelled that right) and going to fat 32. He said it just keeps saying "unknown". I have no idea what he is talking about, but hopefully you do and can tell us how to fix this. Thanks
Wow. Well, that's weird. I guess not that weird for around here, but still pretty weird. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
It's not the infamous 504 MiB size barrier if it's a new system. Sounds like the boneheads who set up the PC at the manufacturer just made tiny partitions on the drive for some reason.
Try booting to DOS and typing "FDISK /STATUS" to see how the partitions are set up, and tell us what you see.
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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.
Paleo Pete
09-14-2000, 11:46 PM
Look in the BIOS for a setting to Enable LBA or it might just be Large. If it's Large, it will be obviously related to hard drives. I don't know what BIOS you have, so I'm really not sure what to tell you to look for. But it sure sounds like Large Block support is turned off in BIOS. Check the BIOS links in the site posted below, you might find better info there. Look for the BIOS Survival Guide also, it's great.
http://www.zing.com/picture/pf6b0795b25a6c3b3085c5cc19f8532af/ff87923f.gif.orig.gif
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