Disk size problem

[brentkiosk]

We have had W98 on 30G Maxtor IDE drive for about 2 years. In the process of dealing with another dying drive, W98 was removed - the partition removed - and W2000 installed. We used NTFS for W2000, and the install goes OK except at the end, the OS reads the drive size as 8G instead of 30G. BIOS gets it right at 30, but W2000 only sees it as 8?

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Slugbait]

Not a very detailed description (another drive=second drive? dual-boot? active partition? etc?), but my guess is you removed the partition, and it's still removed. In other words, there's 20G of unpartitioned space on your drive.

 

[brentkiosk]

It's the only drive on the system. It's set up with the whole drive as the active partition. We just put W98 back on. It gives a 30 G disk size. The idea is to try to install W2000 as an upgrade, but when we try to reboot 98, we're getting adapter settings wrong messages. This can't be related.

 

[Pariah]

I agree, you gave a rather vague description of the problem. There are two 8GB limits I am aware of, and neither you should have encountered. One, is an 8GB boot partition limit for older Windows NT variants, which Win2k should not have. The other is an 8GB ATA BIOS limit which should not be an issue either if you already had the full 30GB drive running in Win98. Did you have to use any Maxtor utilities to originally access all 30GB of the drive? Try formatting the full 30GB in DOS using FDisk, and then installing Win2000. The drive will be FAT32, but you should have access to the whole drive. You can convert to NTFS but that isn't recommended since a FAT32->NTFS conversion created 512byte clusters which will kill disk preformance.

 

[brentkiosk]

We have been trying to solve this problem for a while. The objective is to get W2000 on the disk. After some initial failures, we slaved the disk to another W98 computer and used Norton to wipe info for a few hours. Then we used Fdisk to get rid of the partition. put it back in it's own box and installed W2000. At the point where the W2000 install is ready to actually install, it says all we have is an 8G disk. W2000 installs and runs fine in this partition.

After this, we can boot from the W98 CD, use Fdisk to get rid of the 2000 partition, and successfully install 98 in 30 G. However we can't upgrade this 98 install to 2000 - the system hangs somewhere after asking about changing to NTFS.

Edit: We did not yet try a FAT32 W2000 install. No Maxtor utilities were originally needed for the original W98 install.

 

[Pariah]

It is HIGHLY recommended that you do NOT upgrade Win98 to Win2k. You are simply asking for problems doing that. Just clean install Win2k.

 

[brentkiosk]

OK - thanks for the upgrade warning. But we still dont get 30G with a clean 2000 install.

 

[Pariah]

When is the installer telling you the drive is 8GB? Right at the beginning when it asks you to choose which partition to install to? Try just completely clearing the drive off, including removing all partitions and see what the installer detects then.

 

[brentkiosk]

That's where it happens. We just removed all partitions, and it says we have 8G of unpartitioned space.

 

[Pariah]

I'm not really sure what to tell you. Win2k removed the int13h addressing size limitation, so you should not be seeing it. The only other possible solution I can give you is install the drive in another NT based machine or use a 3rd party disk utility and format the entire drive in NTFS. No matter how you install NT/2k clean, it creates a FAT partition first and then converts it to NTFS which is the only possible reason you are having the problem you are. Even so, you still shouldn't see it.

 

[brentkiosk]

Thanks. I can slave it to another W2K machine, but I think that was tried yesterday. We will probably give one more try tonight, then worry about it later.