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What have I done to my hard drive???

R

Ramses

Platinum Member
Been playing with dual booting linux again. Several distros.
Long story short, Grub failed the other day after install and apon further examination
my 40gig drive is now seen as an 8gig magicaly.

Bios still see's a 40, this is an NEC Versa SX that's been fine with this drive and no funky bios stuff for ages. Near as I can tell somehow the cyl.head.sectors have gotten botched up. Somehow.

It's a Toshiba drive, so no utilities from the manufacturer. I've run the old seagate format utility that would let you set cyl/head/sectors, fixmbr and several other things. Nothing, same old 8gig.

I'm lost. New one on my after all these years.
Any thoughts?
 
get a copy of partition magic
defrag the drive extra well with diskkeeper, then use parititon magic to resize the drives... you will be able to do that with out haveing to format or anything
hope it hopes
 
PQ magic says it's an 8gig drive...

The only thing's that still see it's full size are the bios or software that accesses the drive directly somehow, some DOS low level utilities.
 
sounds like it's portioned I think I had a simaular troubles the only thing that could change it back for me was the linux CD I used to create the portition in the first place, but this was long ago.
 
First extract and save whatever data you need, then try fdisk and format from the win98se startup disk.

If this doesn't work, things can get dicey. A low level format from the drive manufacturer's utilities are the best bet if you can find them.

If not, the "Ultimate boot disk" is a bootable cd that has a fistfull of utilities on it from manufacturers and others. The utilities are mostly dos based and tricky to understand so use caution. This includes at least one utility that lets you change the cyl/sector info thats reported to bios. Ranish Partion manager at http://www.ranish.com/ I believe is the one I've used in the past.


Jim
 
Check the jumper settings on the drive, some had a setting that limited the capacity to 8.4 gigs so old computers wouldnt freak out. Havent seen that for a while though.

Check this out too.

Check here also.
 
Originally posted by: CrispyFried
Check the jumper settings on the drive, some had a setting that limited the capacity to 8.4 gigs so old computers wouldnt freak out. Havent seen that for a while though.

Check this out too.

Check here also.
Click to expand...

Yep, what he said, some of the older drives had a jumper on it that could limit the drive to 8gb for compatibility with older motherboards, thats most likely the problem.
 
I don't see how it could be a jumper as the drive has been in first my Sager and then this NEC for three or four years working fine.

Linux did this. Somehow.

I can tell you how it went down. I had win2k installed past the cyl that linux/Grub needed to boot so Grub errored out and apon trying to set my win2k active again I discovered this problem.

Toshiba has no utilites for this drive, I've run rannish partition manager, several old universal low format utilites, no impact. The BIOS see's the drive's capacity fine, it's any kind of software that only see's 8gig. I've never seen anything quite like this.
 
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