40GB hard drive, auto detects only 31.4 GB

[Guest_imported]

I have a Maxtor 40.0 GB hard drive, but when I right click on my D:/ drive (maxtor drive), it says that my total capacity is only 31.4 GB. I have a Win98 SE. I have partitioned my drive using fdisk and formated it too. My bios is on AUTO detect hard drive, and i noticed that i couldn't change the hard drive's size from bios or fdisk. I don't know what to do, help would be appreciated...

 

[Snickle]

Go back into the BIOS and on the first screen, note what the parameters are of the hard drive, if they are shown. Then go to the AutoDetect hard drive screen and let the BIOS re-detect the drive, note the parameters.

The parameters should be the same as on the label on the drive.

As an example, these are the parameters for a Maxtor 2.8GB drive:
Cylinders 5583
Heads 16
Sectors 63

Looking at a 40GB on Maxtor's site gives these parameters:
Cylinders 16383
Heads 16
Sectors 63

And the BIOS must have the LBA feature enabled, which the AutoDetect usually does.

The formatted capacity should be closer than what you are getting.

 

[wolluf]

How old is your motherboard's Bios? 32GB is one of the 'drive size' barriers (ie, some bioses can't 'see' anything larger, so larger drives appear as around 32GB). If this is the case, you may be able to get a bios upgrade, or failing that, Maxtor will probably have a software utility on their site to get round the problem (although there will be restrictions on how you can use the hard drive compared to just using Bios to set it up).