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fdisk not seeing size of hard drive

B

bdclary

Junior Member
Hello,

Last night I installed a new Western Digital 100 GB hard drive, but when I tried to fdisk it, it read the size as 504 MBytes. Is this ok? If not, what's causing it?

My computer is a Dell bought Feb '99:

Windows 98
PIII 600
512 MB RAM
DVD-ROM
CD-RW
10 GB Hard drive
Internal Zip (I replaced this with the 100 GB HD).

Also, it has an IDE card. The main (10 GB) hard drive and the CD-RW are connected to the card. The 100 GB HD and the DVD-ROM are connected to the mother board IDE.

Thanks,
Brian
 
Hmm Dell... You may check out the western digital website. There is a utility you can install so your BIOS can read the 100gig drive. The dell bios may not support it.


Edit: You can also always connect the 10 gig to the motherboard and connect the 100 gig to the ide card.
 
when fdisk starts, it asks you if you would like to enable large disk sizes... did you say yes or no?

and have you tried putting the 100gig on the ide controller rather than the mobo ide connector? that way you can see if it is a bios support problem for the mobo's ide controller
 
yes, in fdisk you have to enable large disk support for DOS to recognize partitions larger than 540 megs.
 
Thanks guys, I have the floppy that came with the hard drive; I'll go through that tonight.

I did tell fdisk to enable large disk support when it asked me, though I'll try again tonight.

About putting the new HD on the IDE card controller: I had originally put it in this way. My old HD is also on the IDE card. Both are on their own cables with nothing else on the cables. When I powered up, it said "Operating System not found" so I assumed that with both drives on the same controller, it was choosing the wrong one to boot from.

Brian
 
I could be wrong, but im getting this strange vibe that you are running fdisk from a dos window in win98... if this is true, try running fdisk from dos (hold ctrl while win98 starts booting, that will give you the boot menu from which you can choose "command prompt only")
 
D'oh!

I'm an idiot. Yes, I tried to do it through a DOS window. It was midnight last night and I was tired 🙂

For this blunder, I shall be forced to work tech support at AOL for a week.

Thanks,
Brian
 
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