Why is my hard drive less than indicated in BIOS ?

[gomirage]

hey everyone,
I have a dell latitude than i just bought second hand. the seller told me it 6 GIG hard drive and the BIOS confirm it (it says 6485 Mega).
But when using it with Windows 98 the hard drive (C) says only 1.99 Gig. How can i have the entire 6G available on the C. I do not have any other drive beside the CD-Rom drive that i guess is not using the missing 4 GIG.
Any help will be appreciated

 

[rclarke250]

use a boot disk and run fdisk...It will most likely show that only a partition of 2GB was created, now you can either partition the remaining 4GB and create a drive d: or e: or if you have software to put back on it, you can erase the c: partition and start over creating a new one,but you will loose all data on the drive...The third option is to use a program called partition magic,this will add in the unused space retaining the software on the original partition.
Rich

 

[gomirage]

There is no way i can do it in Windows ? I am really affraid of loosing my data on the C.

 

[wolluf]

Your drive has (probably) been partitioned as fat(16) - max size 2Gb rather than fat32 (large disk support turned off in fdisk). Rich's advice covers the options you have pretty well.