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What is going on with my hard drive?

A

AvesPKS

Diamond Member
Ok. Yesterday I reinstalled Win2k. After doing this, one of my hard drives (27gb, 5400rpm, about 2 and a half years old) doesn't make it through. Windows wouldn't recognize it as formatted; fortunately, I was able to recover some of the data from it. Now, I go to format it, and it comes up as an 8gb hard drive. That's the largest partition it will allow me to put on it. Any ideas?
 
Are you trying to format NTFS? I don't remember the specs, but FAT32 partitions, and certain operating systems limit sizes.
You may have to format FAT32, then after windows recognizes it, tell windows for format it NTFS and change the partition sizes.

I thought the partitions for FAT32 were larger... But I am not familiar with Win2k, except server, and we use SCSI.

Don't forget to refer to your manual/manufacturer website. Lots of drives are covered for 3 eyars also.
 
Originally posted by: Bacinator
Are you trying to format NTFS? I don't remember the specs, but FAT32 partitions, and certain operating systems limit sizes.
You may have to format FAT32, then after windows recognizes it, tell windows for format it NTFS and change the partition sizes.

I thought the partitions for FAT32 were larger... But I am not familiar with Win2k, except server, and we use SCSI.

Don't forget to refer to your manual/manufacturer website. Lots of drives are covered for 3 eyars also.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the info...I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this to work.

It was originally formatted in FAT32...then when Windows said it needed to be formatted, I formatted in NTFS...and that's when it said it was only 8gb...I'll try to reformat in FAT32.



 
See if you can find a win98 boot disk with fdisk. Boot to the floppy. Remove that partition and exit. Reboot before making another partition. Boot to the floppy again and run fdisk to make the partition. It should see it now as the size that the bios says it is.

Or get a hold of partition magic, the whole program or the two boot disks, and resize it with that.
 
Originally posted by: redbeard1
See if you can find a win98 boot disk with fdisk. Boot to the floppy. Remove that partition and exit. Reboot before making another partition. Boot to the floppy again and run fdisk to make the partition. It should see it now as the size that the bios says it is.

Or get a hold of partition magic, the whole program or the two boot disks, and resize it with that.
Click to expand...

Just tried the fdisk on a Win98 bootdisk...didn't work. It still came up as an 8gb disk.

 
How old is this computer? Can the bios only support a 8Gb HD? Do you use a program to override the bios before? Like Maxblast for Maxtor HD's.
 
Originally posted by: Peacekeeper100
How old is this computer? Can the bios only support a 8Gb HD? Do you use a program to override the bios before? Like Maxblast for Maxtor HD's.
Click to expand...

It's a Soyo K7V Dragon, with a Thunderbird 1.4. It has no problem recognizing my 20gb and 80gb hard drives. Also, after trying the fdisk partition, I am now the proud owner of a 2gb hard drive...

😕
 
2.5 years old? Might still be under waranty? If you don't have paperwork, look at the manufactured date sticker on the HD...hopefulyl it's still covered....
 
If your only seeing 2 gig, it now sounds like it was possibly set up as fat 16 instead of fat 32.

Try going to the drive manufacturers site and download their utilities. Most of them have a write zero's or low level format utility that wipes the drive and resets it. Running this type of program would reset the MBR on the drive, enabling you to know that it starting from scratch. It would also tell you if there was some sort of problem. It will probably take a couple of hours to run the format, so I when I do it I usually do it over night.
 
Which OS you using? if you are running Windows 2000 or XP goto Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management (Left hand side)

See if you're HD there is dectected properly.. if so, you probably just need to re-partition.
 
Originally posted by: sunkim50
Which OS you using? if you are running Windows 2000 or XP goto Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management (Left hand side)

See if you're HD there is dectected properly.. if so, you probably just need to re-partition.
Click to expand...

I'm running Win2k...I've tried formatting using the Disk Management tool, a Win98SE boot disk (suggested here), and having it unformatted and doing it directly through Explorer.

I will download one of the appropriate programs (I believe it's a WD) and go from there.

Thank you for all the responses and help.

 
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