Neighbor has a hard drive problem

[Drew888]

He has a gateway (forget model-written it down at home) PC, and he tells me he just installed an 80gb drive in addition to what he has.
It shows up as a 1.65gb drive.
I would like to help him but not take a couple trips/days to do it.
How should I approach the diagnosis?

thinking I should first open it up, check jumpers/cables.
boot to bios and check what it sees, then use fdisk to see whats there?
I own a copy of partition magic and ghost so I could also use them to see what they see.

Form there I dunno...what should I do next?, and what if they all report 1.65gb?

Thanks,

 

[ski]

If it's showing up in BIOS, then the cables and jumper position should be ok.

Which model is the PC?

 

[projector1]

where does it show that the drive is only 1.65gb drive,
in addition to what he has was the orginal drive 1.65gb?
IS there any os installed, if so which one?
is it possible to try the drive in another pc to confirm it is ok and 80gb.

 

[wolluf]

How old is machine? (ie, does bios support this size drive)
You need to establish this first - and also if there is a bios upgrade available to enable this support (if this is the problem).

If bios is ok, has your neighbour partitioned and formatted this drive - and if so, did they use fdisk and was large drive support enabled? (thinking of the 2GB Fat16 partition limit).

 

[Drew888]

I am not sure of the year but I will be loking at it sometime tonight.

It's a PIII 750 so I assume it sees over 2gb I'd guess his original drive is 20gb.

It shows 1.65gb in XP Home (he upgraded to xp from 98SE a few months ago).

I checked with Gateway Support and there is a BIOS upgrade but it doesn't give details as to what they fixed/added.

So,

Check BIOS settings/open case and check cables/jumpers/run fdisk and reformat. Then see where we are. Am I missing anything?

Thanks guys!

 

[projector1]

do you have access to the xp home cdrom. if so use that and boot from it (enable boot from in bios), follow the instructions to install fresh copy of xp

you will come to a screen that displays all the drives, partitions, see what that says.
(do not worry if you do have a operating system installed you will not lose it, once you see what the drives, partitions and sizes you have the option to cancel and then the pc will reboot) . fdisk is ok but i find the utility that comes on the xp cdrom a better option.
You could also get your hands on the "ebcd" from

http://ebcd.pcministry.com/

very useful tool. I t has great diagnostic tools

 

[Drew888]

Get this... my neighbor followed the hard drive instructions given w/his old Gateway for the new "Hitachi" drive.
Jumpers were in the wrong place. I pulled it out (no jumpers=master) and booted. This time I went from 1.55 to 36GB (drive is actually 60GB). I looked at it more closely and there was a very tiny black jumper that I missed.
I removed it and ...

Yes all is well.

Thanks!