update and question about Fat 32

[rene]

Greetings: Rene here:
1st. An update on the cd101 error problem back in Oct of last year. To finally correct the problem I installed a new cdrom. Everything worked fine and still does. I wish to thank you for all your help and advise you gave.
2nd. I built another computer. No problem, everything works fine however I had installed a 1.02g hard drive and installed windows 98, works fine but windows is reporting that I have only 503 mb on the hard drive. I do not have any other files on it yet. If I do a fat 32 will I loose everything on the drive and have to start over? Please advise!!!!!

[Paleo Pete]

First, give us some more system information, in a case like this it would help very much.

That sounds like a BIOS drive size limitation, which can probably be worked around, but you might lose all data depending on how it's done. If you do it with fdisk and it happens to work, yes you'll lose all data on the drive, since you'll have to wipe out and recreate the partition(s) to do it.

I don't think changing to FAT 32 will do the trick though, since the problem is most likely in the BIOS, not in the FAT table. It won't see more than a certain number of Cylinders, Heads and Sectors. Changing to FAT32 won't change what the BIOS sees.

The PC Guide's Overcoming BIOS Disk Size Barriers (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/over.htm) has plenty info concerning this issue.

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