Hard Drive capacity wont show up correctly!! HELP!

[DaCurryman]

Ok, I'm really frustrated with this because I've been working on it for like a week now...I should've asked you all sooner for help.

I have this old Pentium 200 that I'm giving to someone. It had an old 3.2 gig HD. Before I gave it away I wanted to give them a decent HD, so I bought a 30.7gig IBM Deskstar 307030 from a fellow ATer. The HD is fine from what I can tell.

Now the problem... The Pentium computer wont fully recognize it as a 30gig HD. The most it will give me is 8gigs. I reformatted it when I first got it to clean it out so I could clean install Win98SE. I try and install Win98SE and it says that there's something wrong with the file system and it cant install the OS.

So I goto fdisk and it says size: 29K megabytes (basically 30gigs), but then it says file system: unknown (instead of the FAT32 I know I formatted it to). Also the max it will let me make the primary partition or total of any partitions is 8gigs.

I finally accepted it as 8gigs so I could install the OS and then install Partition Magic to see if it could change anything. PMagic says it's only an 8gig HD.

I put the HD in my Dell 4550 as a slave and run my PMagic...and it says 8gig partition, 22gigs unallocated (so it sees the full 30 gigs). I don't know why the other computer just wont accept it as a 30gig HD.

I went to the Abit site this morning and downloaded the latest BIOS and flashed the BIOS. I'm truly lost. I just want to be rid of this comp already...why wont it work...please some help...

Computer Info:
Processor: Pentium 200
BIOS: Award 4.51PG
Motherboard: AB-PR5
Chipset: Intel Triton VX Chipset
Hard Drive: IBM Deskstar 307030

If there's anything you need to know, just ask. Thanx in advance for any help.

 

[PuppyLovinGuy]

Sound like it is in FAT (not FAT32)
Re format it with NTFS. Try to use w2k or wXP CD.
If you don't go to the DOS prompt and use fdisk to wipe out everything, even the main, all of it scrap it. Start completly fresh.

 

[Mday]

it's a hardware problem. the vx chipset can only do 8GB. you can update the bios as much as you want, it wont recognize higher ones by itself. get yourself a pci ata\ide controller (i recommend the promise ones). you could do a software overlay, but that's a pain in the ass.

 

[q2261]

Get ezbios from Maxtor or some site and install it. Should work.

 

[Warders23]

I also recommend buying a ata/66 controller. your computer's BIOS is the source of the problem because it could not recognize the big drives.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Its your motherboard chipset. You are actually lucky that it even picks up 8 gigs, its use to be limited to 2 gigs. Basically, if you use fdisk and partition out the hard drive to different partitions 8 gigs or smaller, you should see the entire drive (make three 8 gig partitions and 1 or 2 partitions with whatever is left over, might be best to make the first 1 or 2 partitions the smaller ones, then he can load his OS onto those partitions and use the rest for data/games/software).