Using old hard drive

[kpetursson]

I have a 60gb hard drive I pulled out of my old win98 box. The Win98 box only saw the drive as a 30gb drive (I know this a BIOS issue, but it wasn't a problem and the were no new BIOS updates available). Now I want to use the whole 60gigs. The Disk management portion of XP shows the Hard drive, but only show the formatted portion of 30gb.
Is there a way of getting the rest of the hard drive partitioned and formatted in win XP, or do I still need to use DOS?
THanks.

Kevin Petursson
--
"Everyone says quotable things everyday, but their not famous... so nobody cares."... Some Person

 

[youcandoit]

use disk management in the MMC

right click ---> my computer -->> manage -->disk management --->fdisk/format the drive----> any data will be lost. assign new drive leter and your good, i think.

 

[satrow]

Hi Kevin, once you've backed up any data you may need to another drive, you can delete the partition(s) and then create new ones using XP's Disk Management.

Right-click My Computer and select Manage > Storage > Disk Management.

Andy.

 

[lpblauen]

you can also use partition magic to enlarge the partition. That way you won't lose the data already there.

 

[wolluf]

You can just create a new partition in the free space (if you don't want to delete existing) - using disk management - so you'll have 2 partitions on the disk.

If you do want a single 60GB partition, then XP will only allow you to create an NTFS one (max size for fat32 creation in XP is 32GB - though it will happily use larger ones if created by another utility - like fdisk or thrid party tool).

 

[assets]

With windows98 the standard install was fat16. With some older PC you could not use fat32 (bios issues). This problem reminds me of the DOS 3.x 32meg limit. where you needed to partition the drive usually 40meg to C: and D:

Never give up never give in.

There are no short cuts to anything worth doing

 

[satrow]

I'm wondering if this is a CHS translation issue from the original setup or, possibly caused by a 32Gb 'clip' to ensure that the drive was seen by the original mainboard BIOS.

Can you pull the drive out and double check the jumpers against the manufacturers data? Is it just set as Master or Slave - no extra jumper to limit the capacity?

 

[kpetursson]

satrow. No extra jumpers, I've set it to cable select. (in as slave drive)

If I reformat the drive from FAT32 to NTFS will my networked Win98 computer still be able to share files with it?

The Windows disk management did not give me the option to simply add another partition, as I would have been happy with that. Shouldn't the windows disk management have seen that it's a 60gb disk with a single partition of 30gb and an unpartitioned/unformatted part? if not, what good is the window disk management?

I do not have Partition Magic, nor am I going to spend the money on it for this one instance.

I will back up the data to another drive, and try youcandoit's suggestion

right click ---> my computer -->> manage -->disk management --->fdisk/format the drive----> any data will be lost. assign new drive leter and your good, i think.

I won't be able to try this for a couple of days. I will post the results when I have tried.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Kevin Petursson
--
"Everyone says quotable things everyday, but their not famous... so nobody cares."... Some Person

 

[wolluf]

Kevin,

If you make the drive ntfs, any networked machine will have access to it (assuming you share it of course). Filestore access restrictions only apply where you have more than one o/s on a single machine. Then its local filestore - and if o/s loaded doesn't support the filestore type of a partition (eg, win98 & ntfs), it won't see it. But over the network, the local o/s manges the filestore on its own machine - anything it can read/write to it can allow networked machines to as well.

If XP is NOT seeing a 60GB drive (I'm assuming bios is seeing 60GB), you need to find out what's causing that, because it should show as 60GB (or 55-57) in XP. As you can read the contents in XP, I'm assuming its not overlay software (and you've confirmed no limiting jumper). After backing up the contents, I would use disk management to remove the current partition, then create a new one using the whole available space. If this still says 30GB, sounds like the partition table may be corrupt. I'd use something like killdisk to completely wipe it and start again.

 

[kpetursson]

update...
I chech the BIOS and it is only seeing the drive as a 32gb drive. Checked the specs, and physical drive, no extra jumpers and it should be a 60gb drive.

satrow. What is the CHS translation? How can I get around it?

This is a new computer and the master drive is a 100gb (seen by BOIS and XP)

Thanks for all the help

Kevin Petursson
--
"Everyone says quotable things everyday, but their not famous... so nobody cares."... Some Person

 

[kpetursson]

Thank you all! It's fixed.
Don't I feel stupid. After stating twice that I was sure the jumpers were not the problem, I yanked the drive and looked at it in better light and noticed a black jumper baried deep on the pins that was not easily seen. I pulled this jumper off (not an easy task) and reinstalled the drive. Presto the computer now see it for what it is, a 60gb hard drive.

I sincerely appriciate all of the input!

Kevin Petursson
--
"Everyone says quotable things everyday, but their not famous... so nobody cares."... Some Person