40Gig hard drive but only 3.8 recognized

[Pantera710]

Currently I am running windows 2000 advance server and it will in the next few days depending on whether I can solve this problem or not. I have there Hard drives on this machine. they are 15gigs were the OS is installed, 30gigs and a 40gig hard drives for when I promote it to a domain controller. The problem is that I have not been able to get the system to recognize the full capacity of the 40gig hard drive. It is only able to recognize 3.8gigs. I thought that maybe I needed a bios upgraded so I upgraded the bios, but still same problem. Thought the drive was bad so I downloaded utility from Maxtor to check drive and it did not find any problems. The utility offers a low level format option so I went ahead a performed a low level formato on the drive once it completed I went ahead and started the system again.

I check the drive capacity and it did display 38.99 some where around there of space being available. I thougt this had solved the problem, but when I tryed to partition the drive through windows I notice that it was again only recognizing 3.8gigs again. I then pulled the drive out and installed it on my windows 98 machine and that machine can see all 40gigs. I can partition it and format and not loose the space at all. I have installed all the patches and updates for windows 2000 I have checked with maxtor and found that I am using there most recent driver. I am stuck at this point so I ask for your advise.

 

[SYAR2003]

as a work around why not partition it at the other computer you testet it in . Then put it back .

 

[Pantera710]

I have thought about doing this but I want to clear out any errors now. Because this will be my domain controller and once I put it into production I don't want to have this or any kind of problem.

 

[SYAR2003]

Try this then..

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/big_drive_enabler.htm

 

[Pantera710]

Here is an update on this...
I went in to download the file from the maxtor web link. Before I ran the install I decided to boot my system with a boot disk. while in the system I ran fdisk and looked at the capacity and it gives my that it is a 40gig hard disk. So I went ahead and created one 40gig partition and formated the drive before rebooting the system. I went ahead and rebooted logged into my system and pulled up the disk managment console. I then noticed that it was still only displaying 3.8gigs as being available. In all desperation to get it to work I desided to boot the system with my windows 2000 cd and install a new copy of windows. When I got to the partitioning screen of the install I noticed that it too showed that I had all 40gigs available to use. I proceeded to install windows. The installation completed with no problems. Booted the system and check the capacity on my disk and I have all 40gigs available. But if I restart the system and boot into the original installation I can only see 3.8gigs. The only differance between the two installations is that one (original) has all the latest patches and updates installed and it is running service pack 4. the other installation (New) has only what came on the CD. I believe that one of the updates might be causeing my problem with the hard disk. I am going to run it like this with no updates of any kind for a couple of days and then I will install the updates on the new istall and see if the drive is not fully recognized. I will post an update once I have it... Or has any one else expeerienced this problem already?