Problems with Windows detecting HD correctly.

[Guest]

Just built freinds computer today and all went well ecept that window is seeing the brand new 20G hard drive as a 2.0 g drive. The bios sees it as 20G, we are not running 98Se just 98. I did not format hard drive from DOS I let windows instalation format it and it seemed like a fast format. any ideas as to why???

 

[Toejam31]

Without partitioning the drive <i>before</i> installing the operating system, and choosing large disk support, the Win98 CD probably formatted the drive as FAT16, which has a size limit of 2GB. The rest of the hard drive was basically ignored.

Your choices are to either repartition the drive with a <A HREF="http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/original.htm" target="_new">startup disk</A> and the FDISK tool, and choose large disk support ... or install a program like PartitionMagic and either create a second partition (or more) from the free space, and/or allocate the free space to the primary, active partition.

You might find this link to be helpful:

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867" target="_new">How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (Q255867)</A>

PartitionMagic 7.0 can be obtained <A HREF="http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/" target="_new">here</A>.

Toejam31

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