HARD DRIVE. showing less capacity than it has

[BUNTER78]

Hi All,
I have recently (last night) put together a system with a EPOX 8k7A mobo Athalon 1.4 gig ddr with a 41.2gb IBM Ericsson 60GXP ATA-100 8.5ms 2MB cache 7200rpm Hard Drive. now when i started to install windows 98 it asked initialy did i want to enable large disk support incorrectly ( i presume) i firstly answerd no and after win98 was installed i looked at the size of the Hard drive and it was 2gb. so i started again and this time answere yes.. now the hard drive was showing on the 'My computer' screen in win 98 as capacity 31.4gb used 260MB free 31.2GB now to me this makes no sense as 1> the drive is a lot bigger 2> win 98 takes up a lot more than 260MB so i ran a Thorough Disk check which took about 3 hours and the results were:-

33,005,440 KB total disk space
0 Bytees in bad sectors
2,654,208 Bytes in 157 folders
6,176,768 Bytes in 93 hidden files
293,158,912 bytes in 3,295 user files
32,710,528 KB available on disk
16,384 bytes in each allocation unit
2,062,840 total allocation units on disk


I really want the full capacity of the hard drive and am at aloss as to why these figs do not add up. is it possible that when I fdisked I screwed something up? I have nothing on the system yet so is not a problem for me to wipe everything and start again.. but that is what I thought that I had done the second time!!!

any help greatly appreiciated.

thanks
anthony

 

[Vegito]

check for new bios, maybe bios limitations... check fdisk goto option 4 or 5 on view all drives and see if it's 100%, if it's 100% that means ur bios isn't reading above 33gb.. if there is a few % left, u can still create the rest of 8gb

 

[BUNTER78]

Hi,
I will check on fdisk..when u say chack for new BIOS what exactly do you mean? see if the MOBO manufacturer has released aBIOS flash or check in my BIOS, i did have a quick look (v quick am too much of a beginner to play around in there) but could see no immediatly relevant information..

thanks

 

[wasnlos]

there's no BIOS-limitation for that board that could interfere here.
BUNTER, did you check the jumper-settings for master/slave of the harddisk, just to make sure it's not set for 32GB-clip whatever it's called.

there are 4 pairs of pins, to set it master, simply set the jumpers to the pairs on the outer left and right side.

 

[Jeff H]

BUNTER78, check this page for an explanation of jumper settings that force a 32G drive size limit. Make sure you're not set to this limitation.

 

[jsbush]

Also you have to remeber that they advertise there drives using 1gig = 1000megs, but it's really 1024. So when you format the drive you will have less the 41.2gigs. I don't know how much less, but I've only got 18.3gigs on my 20gig quantum because of that.

So 41.2gigs is messured using 1000megs as a gig but in reality it's 1024megs a gig.

You should still get more then 31gigs though.

 

[BUNTER78]

Jeff H, Wasnlos,
I have had a look at the page you linked and that would seem to explain it, so if i just set my jumpers as master (on each side parallel) this prob should be resolved I just hope that i do not find when I get home that the jumpers are not set that way already . out of interest I could not determin from tha page what jumper settings would enable the capacity clip??

thanks for the help
Anthony