Hard drive size problem with a twist

[oinky]

I'm working on an 80GB Samsung hard drive, model SV8004H. When a friend tried formatting it in Windows XP, it only came out as a 32GB drive. I figured she was doing it in FAT32, so I tried reformatting it in Win 98. Oddly enough, it still came out as a 32GB drive. I then noticed some strange jumper options I had never seen before - the drive can be set to master, slave, and cable select like normal, but for each one of those modes, you can also select "Lower 32GB," "Upper 32GB," or "32GB Clip." If I put a file on the drive, it will show up on the drive in any of the 3 modes. I can't figure out what these settings mean, or even if they're what's keeping me from formatting all 80GB. Any ideas are much appreciated.
Thanks,
-Matt

 

[bruincal]

make sure that your system BIOS supports drives larger than 32gb... there are specific barrier limits for bios, such as 8gb, 32gb, and 64gb... your bios might not be able to support larger than 32gb, so it just shows up as 32gb... so any kind of format in winxp or win98 would only be able to create a 32gb drive

 

[Nothinman]

Any decent OS (i.e. Linux, NT, etc) will ignore the BIOS and talk directly to the IDE controller for the drive parameters and any IDE controller under ATA/133 can support drives up to 127G.

I would find the manual (possible on the web site if she doesn't have the hard copies any more) and see if they saw what the jumpers do.

 

[oinky]

only bump

 

[Superwormy]

"When a friend tried formatting it in Windows XP, it only came out as a 32GB drive. I figured she was doing it in FAT32, so I tried reformatting it in Win 98"


That really shouldn't make a difference... both Windows XP and Windows 98 will format in FAT32...

Try formatting in NTFS in WinXP, see if that works...

 

[oinky]

Strange as it seems, apparently XP can only format FAT32 up to 32GB.
Thanks for the ideas, I'll see if I can get someone to try NTFS for me.

 

[Nothinman]

Strange as it seems, apparently XP can only format FAT32 up to 32GB.

It's not strange when you realize how bad a filesystem FAT really is. MS wants people to stop using it and start using NTFS.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

MS has a "bug" (intentional) in the NT FastFAT driver that does not allow Win2k and XP to format drives larger than 32GB with FAT32, they can read/write to it just fine, so you can format it w/ a Win98 boot disk and all is good. But just not under the NT kernel.

Yeah, I think it's stupid too, but that's what I found out when I tried to put my 60GB on FAT32 under Win2k.