Hard drive only reading as 10Gigs

[dmw16]

A friend of mine and I are trying to get his computer working. We went out and bought an 80GB Maxtor hard drive and put it in his sytem. We fired up the computer from a Win98 book disk and ran fdisk and made a partion and rebooted. Then I went back into fdisk, but it said the drive is only 10GBs. I decided to run a format anyway and Im still waiting to see what happens. His BIOS lists it as an 80GB drive, but it wont show up as one. I would think it was the drive, but we've already had a similar problem with another 80GB drive showing up as a 33GB drive. Any ideas?
thanks,
-doug

 

[Steven the Leech]

what OS? You may try NTFS

 

[dmw16]

I'm going to eventually put on Windows XP, but I cant even get out of the BIOS. It's a brand new drive and it is only showing as 10Gigs. Im going to format it as NTFS once I get it working, but Windows 98 can recognize 80GB...cant it?
thanks,
-doug

 

[DeschutesCore]

98 SE with the Large IDE Patch can use 80, but it's ill-advised. NTFS is the way to go with larger drives.

"Windows 98 Large IDE Update"
"This update addresses an issue on Windows® 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition computers that have an integrated device electronics (IDE) hard disk that is larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size. If you use the protected-mode (graphical) version of ScanDisk to perform a thorough scan (which includes a surface scan) on an IDE hard disk that is larger than 32 GB, ScanDisk may report errors on every cluster after approximately cluster number 967,393."

Sounds to damned scary to risk it except for experimenting.

Oh, and here's the answer to your quesiton.

Western Digital Support

 

[dmw16]

Thanks. I just remembered that WIn98 doesnt support that much space. And that if you put a drive in under 98 that is say, 80GB it'll show up as 11GB, which is what Im seeing now. So problem solved. Thank you.
-doug