Hard Drive Possessed????

[Lalakai]

Okay folks, need some help. Just installed a 4 gig hd in a friend's computer; cmos recognizes it as a 4 gig but when I go into fdisk, it only sees 427 megs. Originally there was a "non-dos" partition that I removed, but I still can't get the system to see the full hd. Any suggestions???

running W95

thanks people

 

[rbV5]

Run fdisk again, look at the partition info. Delete all the partitions. Create a new partition using all of the space (unless you want more than 1) Reboot your computer using your bootdisk again, now run format and format your drive. (use format x: /s to make the disk bootable (replace x with the drives drive letter)

 

[Lalakai]

yep, already tried that and after deleting all partitions then rebooting, it still showed only 427 megs available. Strange thing is, originally when I viewed the disk, it showed 4000+ megs in a non-dos partition; after deleting the non-dos partition then rebooting, it just showed the 427 megs. Even formatting only showed 427 available. Even worse, the drive shows up as it should in CMOS :| Got any bat's blood or chicken's teeth??? thanks for the suggestions though.

 

[CrackRabbit]

Sounds like you may of had a LILO partition on there, try doing a Fdisk /mbr to kill the master boot record try deleting all the partitions again (making sure large disk support is turned on) and format and see what the results are....

CrackRabbit

 

[PH0ENIX]

*yawn*

Most likely answer;

You're running Win95a, which doesn't support FAT32.
The original 'NON-DOS' partition was most likely a FAT32 partition, but the old 95a Fdisk doesn't recognize it.

Get Win95 OSR2 or 2.5 (b or c), or go to Win98.

You can just pinch Fdisk from a win98 system, but then you wont be able to install the version of Win95 that you're working with.

427 is a wierd number, it should normally see about 511mb, but it's definately characteristic of an old version of Fdisk, especially because of the size of the nondos partition, and the fact that the BIOS sees it allright.

Good Luck!

 

[PH0ENIX]

*yawn*

Most likely answer;

You're running Win95a, which doesn't support FAT32.
The original 'NON-DOS' partition was most likely a FAT32 partition, but the old 95a Fdisk doesn't recognize it.

Get Win95 OSR2 or 2.5 (b or c), or go to Win98.

You can just pinch Fdisk from a win98 system, but then you wont be able to install the version of Win95 that you're working with.

427 is a wierd number, it should normally see about 511mb, but it's definately characteristic of an old version of Fdisk, especially because of the size of the nondos partition, and the fact that the BIOS sees it allright.

Good Luck!

 

[Lalakai]

Crackrabbit, you might have something there. Also, that's a new fdisk command that looks usefull; I know there's another format x: ? command that will forcefully wipe out everything, but I'll try the mbr first.

Phoenix, he is running an earlier version of 95 and his current hd is set for fat 16, though I thought that doing a fresh install of the 4 gig, wiping out all partitions then starting over, would do the trick. Before he changes to 98, we gotta save some critical files from his old hd, so that may get bumped up on the priority list.

Thanks for the help folks, but don't be shy about posting other alternatives (yeah yeah, get a decent system is what I immediately suggested to him also but................ ), these are always learning experiences.

 

[CrackRabbit]

lalakai, if your friend is working with win 95a there is no way it will see the 4 gig drive correctly if its partitioned using fat 32. if you partiton it using fat 16 your going to have to break it up into mulitple drive letters with less than 2gb in each parition...

 

[Lalakai]

no problem there CrackRabbit as we had planned on dividing it into two 2 gig partitions (don't the system in front of me right now, but give me a bit and I'll try some of the suggestions and see what happens).

may just have to break down and install 98 on the 4 gig and make that one the master, then see if we can salvage the other files from the 1.2 gig that is currently the master

 

[CrackRabbit]

That should work with no problems (making the 4 gig the master with 98 on it) any version of windows can read fat16 there should even be a tool to convert the drive from fat16 to fat32 in win98.