wrong HD size is shown

[iceman3033]

I have several laptops i have just purchased and one of the harddrives is a 4.6 gig and the other in the other laptop is a 5.4 gig, both are compaq armada 1750. both HD's had some companys software installed (the same on both) so i formatted the hard drives and installed Win98se fresh on both...for some reason both of them show to only have 1.99 gig total space in the "my computer" section of windows98se. can some please tell me how to resolve this problem where the correct total amounts of both hard drives are recongnised and not just 1.99 gig for both?? thank you very much in advance for your time!

 

[DantheSaxman]

Have you checked the drives properties in My Computer to make sure that they are formatted FAT32?

 

[iceman3033]

they're fat32 now but they were fat16 until after i had installed win98se and converted them to fat32

 

[smah]

That's why. Fat 16 had a 2GB limit on partition size. If look into it, you will probably find other partitions on the drive or unallocated space. If you want to utilize the entire drives as 1 partition, you will have to use a win98 boot disk and repartition with fdisk.

 

[iceman3033]

ah ok, see i didnt know that, i see the problem now, hey i wanna say thanks...thank you VERY much, been a great help to me!

 

[iceman3033]

oh i do have one last question though, i know someone who used something like quick restore on there desktops harddrive...the files are all there i noticed when i looked through their harddrive....all of it...now do you know of anyway to convert that harddrive back to fat32 from fat16 without having to lose all the files and start over once quick restore was used?? i do appreciate your time

 

[smah]

When you mentioned quick restore, I realized that you did mention that these are Compaq's. Typically, Compaq's come with 2 partitions on the drive - the working partition C and a System_Save partition D. Do you a drive called D: in My Computer that is not your CD rom? The System_Save partition contains an image of the C drive for restoration.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Any changing of the partitions will destroy the data in that partition unless you use a third party tool like Partition Magic.

 

[iceman3033]

ok, yes thats basically what i was asking is if there is alot of data on the HD and its fat16 can all that data be saved and converted over to the fat32 system without having to destroy it and start over. for instance my sister somehow for some unknow reason used gateways GoBack on her HD thinking it was going to "fix" some problem she had had, its basiaclly like compaq restore, when she was done all files remained that were there before the gateway GoBack "fix" except now windows wouldnt load saying it required fat32, i was just wondering if it could be restored back to fat32 without having to scrap all the data shes had on her HD