Problems with my Hard Drive :o(

I hope I can explain this right. Ok, about a year ago I bought a hd from a computershow. Its a Diamonblast Maxtor 40.6 gig.

Last year when I went to install it, the BIOS would only report it as being 33.6 gig. But when I would run the maxblast software, it would look at the drive and say that the drive IS a 40.6gig drive, but I'm only using 33.6gigs of it. So I'm pretty sure I wasn't sold a 33.

Now my motherboard is fairly recent, so I don't see how it could be a limitation thing. Its a gigabyte 7ixe4 running a amd duron 900mhz cpu.

When I installed it last year, I just said 'forget about it' and installed my os with just the 33 gigs. But now I have more plans for this computer so I need as much space as I can get.

I have done just about everything I can think of to get this drive to work. I've tried manually changing the drives specs in cmos based on what the maxblast software told me they were, but the cmos would not let me put in the actual cylinder size. I've tried updating my bios but that didnt fix it. I've also searched the web and I could not find anyone with this issue before. Can ANYONE figure this one out? I'm pulling my hair out here. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Well, it's finally been fixed for me! After a year I'm finally seeing my whole drive. I'm not sure about the ibm drive, but my maxtor drive had a jumper setting called cylinder limitation. The whole time I had this jumper set. I took it off and now my BIOS can see the whole drive. Maybe you have this same problem. Check your drive's spec sheet out and see if there is a jumper like that. good luck.