1gig should be 8 gig.

[joemn]

I have a P3 550mghz machine running win98se. it came with an 8gig HD. Quantum fireball. I added a 2nd HD a year ago. worked ok. now, I tried to revert back to the original setup. i repartitioned, formatted and loaded the OS. But I can only see 504mg. I flashed the bios and found that the system was set to "user" instead of "auto". I adjusted that and now it can see 1000mg. when I do FDISK it says there is only 1 pri/dos partition. whats next?

 

[wolluf]

You're sure its an 8GB drive?

Have you connected it to any other machines? (if so, how big do they think it is)?

Have you tried manually entering the cylinders, heads etc in the bios settings to see if that makes it recognise size properly.

Jumpers ok?

Mobo battery ok? (ie, its not losing its settings?)

Not used any overlay software with it?

 

[cdogg]

If the cylinder count in the the BIOS says 1024 cylinders, then that's why it was only seeing 500+ MB. Changing the setting to auto may have corrected that. However, go back to the settings for the hard drive and make sure LBA is turned on if it exists as a setting.

Assuming that everything in there is set correctly, the problem might be the way the partition was set up. To start over from scratch, simply remove all partition with FDISK and create a new one. Make sure Large Disk Support is enabled and you're using FAT32.


~cdogg
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[PICKER50]

you could try fdisk /mbr then do a regular fdisk if this does not work if you can get a copy of disk manager it will force the drive into seeing the 8 gigs

 

[Polyphonica]

Ok, I think you will need to reformat the drive.

It looks like you originally formatted it as FAT (or FAT16).

This is an old format for hard-drives that only allows a maximum capacity of 540MB (or similar).

Reformat to FAT32 and see if it helps. As a golden rule you should only use FAT32 or NTFS anyway

 

[cdogg]

Polyphonica,

Actually, FAT16 allows partitions up to 2GB. So that is not the problem. Trust me, back in the day when 1GB drives were considered top-of-the-line, the biggest problem was having the cylinder count exceed 1024. Unless you did so, it would never see past the 500+MB mark.

 

[Polyphonica]

I stand corrected

It's just because, when you use FDisk, it warns you that you have to use FAT32 due to the limitations of FAT16 and I'm sure it quotes 540MB. Oh well!

 

[joemn]

I think trying to also reformat a 2nd HD complicated things. i tried installing 1 drive and than both together and than just the 2nd drive. I accessed the H.D.D. thru cmos and i finally got it to see the full disk space after formatting again. the 2nd drive is 60gig and it formats fine but when i try and partition it, it can only see 27gig. I have it disabled for now. I am going to think about it for awhile.