HDD showing wrong size [Archive]

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mainthing

07-04-2003, 03:58 PM

I today fitted a new 40Gb HDD into a removeable HDD caddy. I fdisked and formatted it and on rebooting it showed as 40Gb in the Boot screen but in Windows (ME) it is just 8Gb.
The good news is that it works fine!
I tried it in another PC and does exactly the same. What am I missing?
It's set as a Secondary Master (as was the one it rteplaced, so I know it not the wiring,etc).

glc

07-05-2003, 05:42 AM

Your motherboard probably has an 8gb bios limitation. What motherboard and bios revision do you have?

andyms18a

07-05-2003, 02:48 PM

you may need to use a drive overlay prog to let windows use the full 40gb check with the hdd makers web site for the req softwair

glc

07-06-2003, 12:39 PM

Let's see where we are at before recommending an overlay - there are much better ways to take care of it, especially if it's being used as a removable drive.

mike breck

07-07-2003, 04:35 AM

If you don't know what motherboard or BIOS version you have, then download and run this small program called Belarc Advisor

http://www.belarc.com/Download.html

Alternatively, if your PC is a brand PC like Dell, Compaq etc - then tell us the make and model number.

mainthing

07-07-2003, 06:14 PM

I know the M/board supports 8Gb+ as the main C: drive is 20Gb.
I'm told the problem lies with DOS/Win ME only being able to format to 8Gb. I believe if I use Partition Magic 7 it should work.

glc

07-07-2003, 08:28 PM

WinME will partition and format out to at least 64gb.

mainthing

07-08-2003, 05:08 PM

I downloaded a piece of software (MaxBlast) from maxtor site and it created a floppy. Booted up from it and it ripped through a format and the HDD worked straight away.
I think the problem was the HDD had been used for a dual-boot with Win 2000 on, before being wiped clean. The formatting was not understood by Win ME.