45gb shows up as 32gb, plus another question

[ThePanda]

Hi, my western digital 45gb drive shows up as 32gb in winxp. it also shows 32gb on my system's bios, although the bios does support my ATA100 80gb drive fine. i was using the full 45gb earlier today, but then i tried some of that software raid stuff described on tomshardware, and as soon as i deleted the 45gb partition it showed up as 32gb and i can't get it to go back. western digital's data lifeguard tools say "for win95/98/me" so i guess that's not an option. is the problem my motherboard bios? it's an MSI K7T Turbo (KT133A). I have a PCI IDE controller coming in the mail, so I will move the drive to that and see if it is fixed.

Also, are the motherboard channels faster than the channels of the same speed (ATA100) on the PCI controller? I am guessing that it is better to put hard drives on the mainboard channels first so they don't slow down the PCI bus?

 

[Keego]

If you don't have anything important installed, I'd search for delpart on google and trash the hdd's partitions and start from scratch.

 

[ThePanda]

I deleted the partition using the utility in "compmgmt.msc /s", and it now says "31.49GB unallocated." Is that different from what you are describing?

 

[Duvie]

It is a common problem when the board doesn't support harddrives larger then 32gb....Usually I have seen it happen only with kt133 or older mobos...Try upgrading board to latest bios....

Is it a maxtor??? If so run fdd that comes with it and run like power something program and it will analyse it and tell you if that is a problem...

I worked around my problem with my kt133 board by booting to dos and running fdisk and setting up the partitions on my own...

You still will have less the 45gigs will be closer to like 42-43gigs when formatted...I partitioned into 2 drives...

 

[Keego]

well he just said his 80gb drive works fine...
When you plug it into the PCI IDE controller, all will be fixed*




(*most likely )

 

[yaethom]

This is just a shot in the dark....

but isn't the win2k and winXP FAT32 formatting limited to 32 GB partitions?

I found this out cuz I tried to format a drive larger than 32 GB using winXP.

 

[bacillus]

yaethom has a valid point but if the hdd is only seen as 32Gb in bios then I would check to see that the hdd isn't capacity limited by a jumper at the rear of the drive!

 

[Agent004]

Just format it using the win98 cd or boot disk, as advised in the FAQ.

 

[ThePanda]

<< This is just a shot in the dark....

but isn't the win2k and winXP FAT32 formatting limited to 32 GB partitions?

I found this out cuz I tried to format a drive larger than 32 GB using winXP. >>



in winxp it shows up as 32gb before i even format or partition it, and when i did format it i did it in ntfs. it is western digital by the way. i think i remember seeing on my seagate 80gb drive a jumper that would limit it to 32gb, but i couldn't find anything about a setting like that for the 45gb drive. i'm not sure, but i think it's set as "cable select"; i'll check again when i move it to the other controller.

thanks for the suggestions


EDIT: Agent: Yeah, that would probably work too. I could format it with that it FAT32, then format again in winxp to 41gb as NTFS. I think that's how it was before I messed it up by deleting the partition.

 

[ThePanda]

This Maxtor controller detects it as 32gb too, so I guess it must be a jumper. I'll try to change it, although I know I was using it as 41gb before with the same jumper settings.

 

[ThePanda]

Update: I had the jumpers set wrong before, my bad , thanks for the help