Playing with FDisk and "undersizing" harddrives

[Puffie40]

I need a little help here.

I am fixing my Pastor's Laptop. I reformatted it and Win98 said somthing about LBA problems. So I got out FDisk. Now it thinks a 38GB hard drive is a 7.8gb.

In a simular incident, Win98 formated (Or as I call it, "Undersized") my Mom's 20GB harddrive to 5gb. Is there a way to fix this?

I'll need to partition this harddrive, I know, but I first need to get FDisk to realize it's a 38GB again. Help?

The laptop is a IBM Thinkpad 600 (2645)

Thanks for any help,

Chris

 

[maultier]

YOu might try the Ultimate CD site. The tools on that disk may help you format and partition the drives correctly.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[dbData]

Wow! Stop using Win98 for starters. Win2K and XP are much more stable. You can delete the partition with Fdisk and recreate 'em. If you're looking to save the data then use an extraction tool first. More can be found at

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com.

I don't mean to be cruel, but if it happens again, I'd stop "helping" people if I were you.


Rick

 

[edfair]

It is likely you have run up against hard drive size limitations in the BIOS.
These are normally resolved with drive overlay programs such as disk manager, although you sometimes get them from the drive manufacturer, who has licensed a customized set.

You could do a google search for "disk size limitations" to see if the problem is related.

Another fix is to flash the BIOS to handle the larger drives.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.