win 98 only sees 51% of hdd

[aistewart]

I have an old 233 pentium and when installing win 98 on a new 8gb hdd the bios reads 8043 mb but the primary dos partition is only just over 4 gb. Win 98 sees a c drive of >4gb
when a 250gb hdd is installed win 98 sees just over 8gb, but the bios sees the whole drive.
the new drives were not partitioned but windows only shows 51% of the drive,
Any Ideas would be appreciated as this is bugging me

 

[Crashman]

Ah, well, try using FDISK to delete the partition and make a new one of 8GB on the 8GB drive. As for the 250GB drive, that crosses the barier of what 98 can support.

Partition Magic can access the entire large drive and make partitions of a smaller size, enough small partitions to fill the drive.

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[aistewart]

cheers there were loads of 'experts' round the pc at the time so I couldnt check the partition size, they didnt want to lose their win 98 install.
I will repartition it when they are not looking and hope they dont see me.

 

[Flinx]

Maybe there is a bios flash that will help it see larger "drives".

Win98 & 98SE have maximum partiton sizes but nowhere near as low as 8GB.

There are also mapping utilities that might work (supplied by the hdd vendor) to allow u to see more of the drive. But it usually eats up your performance.

P.S. The 250GB drive is worth way more than the 233. Throw it away. Get a recycled P3 for $100. Your life is too short to be wasting it watching this system reboot.

The loving are the daring!

 

[Codesmith]

My 200 GB seagate showed up as 8 GB (actually 7.x GB) when I attached it to an old Promise Ultra ATA 100 card. After flashing the card's BIOS it worked fine. Many older motherboards with ATA 100 controllers also require a BIOS upgrade to support drives >137 GB.