Old 2.5 Gig hard drive reporting 8.5 Gigs. Won't format past 30%! Trying to install win98se - help!!!

[mellondust]

I am building an old system out of left over parts I have had laying around. It is a celeron 600 system and everything else works fine except when I try to format the hard drive. It is a quantum fireball 2.5 gig drive. I have used it in other systems before including a similar celeron 600 system. I just pulled it from a pentium 166 I had running win 98 and wanted to start with a clean install with this one.

The problem is that when it starts for format the drive it gets about 30% of the way done and freezes. I went into fdisk and looked at what it said and it said the drive was 8.5 or so gigs. What is going on here? Is this a hardware or software issue? I have tried about 5 times to format it but no success. Can I pull this, hook it up to my other computer, and format it that way, or will I still have a problem. Any help would be great!

 

[DeschutesCore]

Check your BIOS and set the drive to auto detect, make sure it isn't retaining old settings. It might also have a copy of EZBIOS on it.

DC

 

[mellondust]

It is already set to auto detect. If it helps, it is an Aopen AX34 motherboard. What is EXBIOS?

 

[DeschutesCore]

EZBIOS is a program that lets older mobo's see larger drives. if the drive was ghosted off a larger drive, it can retain the info for the larger drive and cause the problem you're having. I've only seen it happen once. A Low Level Format can return a drive to normal in those cases. MAXLLF is a good program for blanking drives.

Pick it up here to reset a disk to like new condition here

The only other thing I can think of is your jumpers on the drive or the drive itself being flaky.

DC

 

[Fernholz2]

I had a simular problem with a maxtor 27.2 gig hd. I tried everything even using max blast the bios detected it properly but when i went to format it would give me wierd sizes like 300gigs and stuff like that finally just sent it back to maxtor and got a new 1. it seemed like that was the only way the drive just went bad.

 

[eusebio]

I've had similar problems with corrupt partition tables (with wrong Cyl/Hd/Sect settings stored). I usually solve it using Linux fdisk (by the way: you don't need to install Linux for this, you just need a Linux installation floppy)

Enjoy,

Eusebio