Western Digital Low Level Formatting....

[Tbirdkid]

Guys, i just got a hold of a hard drive that was partitioned or low level formatted from the factory and its a 40 gig drive but I can only see 4 gig of it... How can I open this hdd back up to 40 without screwing it up?

 

[CTho9305]

fdisk? I don't think this counts as highly techincal.

 

[VirginiaDonkey]

I have one of these disks too......we split a pair of them.

here is a lil background...

our factory bought these hard drives from western digital, and partitioned them to use 4.3gb ( the limit of the bios on our machines) the OS used on our machines is Lynx.

when we delete the active partitions, we still only see 4.3gb of available space, when we know they are 40gb drives. my WD utility sees the unused space, but we still cannot access it

Fdisk only cleaned up the 4.3gb, not the remaining 35.6gb

I think our factory might have flashed the rom on the HDD to only use 4.3gb.

 

[Dhanjalus]

You did not specify which Fdisk you tried.
Try the Fdisk that is built into Windows 2000/XP Setup this is able to delete all kinds of funny partitions(Try Linux even!)
Make sure the jumpers on the drive are not set to terminate the drive artificially small(I have an IBM drive that I used this feature on to make a 10GB an 8GB)

Luck!

 

[Tbirdkid]

I used fdisk that comes on a boot disk for win98. It still recognizes it as a 4 gig in windows xp. see the problem is not in windows... it comes up as a 4 gig when we fdisk them. They are 40s though according to western digitals site. There are no jumpers on it... unless they are internal. So therefore it has to be a rom flash.

 

[User1001]

low level format it again. (GWSCAN, anything that rights zeros to the HD)

 

[Jeff7]

Put IBM's ZAP utility on a boot disk, and type in zap 0 to kill the primary master drive. Then run Fdisk and see if it reads the right size. If not, then maybe a cylinder size limit jumper is in place or something like that.
Oh yeah, this is not HT, as has been said, plus this is a dupicate post. If you want better exposure of a thread, post the link to it in your sig; that's what I do.