Computer only finds 33 of a 120gb hard drive...

[BlackEcho]

I bought a nifty 120gb hard drive about three weeks ago and installed it without any problems to my computer which containes a 20gb master drive. I ran Win Xp without any problems at all. I Recently installed a distro of Linux and used partition manager 8 to partition it, it screwed up and installed a bad version of Lilo, the linux bootloader. So I erased the partitions and restored the XP bootloader and wrote zero's to my big drive and bam- now both linux and windows are reading it as a whoping 33gb instead of the 120gb it came with. I wrote zero's to it again, twice but to no prevail. Also partition magic is reading it as having only 33gb of unpartitioned space. Any ideas as of what to do.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Grincho]

Hi

Sounds like a big bugger up mate.

Go to administrative tools in the control panel(I presume you will boot to windows.) Go to computer management, and then disk managegement. I presume your drives are shown here. Hopefully your linux drive has available area there to be partitioned. If not reply back and we will seek another solution.

Grincho

 

[Grincho]

Hey Dude

forgot to ask. You did install file system as NTFS right? and not FAT32 lol

If not do that lol
Grincho

 

[BlackEcho]

Ah... It's not showing up in the Disk Managment or the bios. Only 31.49mb of it is showing up at all. And it had NFTS and Linux Ext. 2 on it before it went crazy.

 

[BlackEcho]

What I meant to say is that no other partitions are showing up except for the 33gb of unpartitioned space.

 

[Grincho]

Let me get this straight.

1. You have 2 drives installed
2. 1 is master containing WIndows and your active partition(boot partition)
3 2 is slave containing Linux install
4. You are booting to windows
5. When viewing drives in disk management no 1 hard drive is showing ok.
6. no 2 drive shows 33gb of unpartitioned space and nothing else.

Grincho

 

[SYAR2003]

Howdy!

Some thoughts...

Have you checked if your harddisk comes with a size limiting jumper, if it does, remove it .
Some hdd manufacturers use special jumper trick so a big hdd can be detected by an old unsupported system as 32gb.



Limits:
The 32GB barrier is due to the inability of the BIOS to address an LBA that is larger than 66,060,287.
24bit LBA also called INT13h extensions.
This system translates the cylinder,
head and sector (CHS) information into a 28-bit logical block address .

Solve:
+BIOS upgrade.
+Instead of onboard IDE controller, you might
buy a new PCI IDE controller with a BIOS supporting larger
drives.
+Install Drive Overlay software ,such as Data Life Guard
form western ,or the maxtors maxblast utility.

Next limit:
The 137GB is an IDE limitation and requires a bios supporting 48bit lba addressing.
Enable in windows:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

( but i guess it's okay anyway as your new drive is 120)


regards
syar

 

[BlackEcho]

Yeah, Grincho, you're right.

The first drive (master) containes my bootable Windows.

The second partition (slave)containes 31-33gb of unpartitioned space, although before this happened it contained a Linux Partition, a second WinXp partition (nfts) and a third partition which held extra programs, documents, music, etc... (nfts).

I've got it installed correctly with the jumpers and everything and it came with an easy-bios program that allowed my computer to read the drive. I just don't know why the other partitions disapeared off of the face of the earth.

 

[wolluf]

'it came with an easy-bios program that allowed my computer to read the drive' - what exactly do you mean by this? (eg, was it overlay software as per SYAR2003 was mentioning? If that has been installed it can cause future problems, and also might indicate your mobo/bios has 32GB limitation (which the overlay would overcome - but once you've wiped the overlay off, you would revert to what the bios can see - eg c. 32GB).

 

[KREST]

Take a look at my thread751-722769.

Hope this helps