Harddrive troubles

[plywood]

Hey some of you may have read my CPU Burnout post awhile back. The problem was the lack of heatsink compound and now the computer is up. However of course a new problem has arisen, which is fdisk is only seeing 13megs of a 80gig harddrive that i need to format.

When i type in the A:\format c:\ after partioning the max capcity which it says 13 megs, i then formatted that to see what would happen and dos wrote, "free space 79.08708blah", but the partition only says 13m.

If anyone knows what I am talking about and can unconfuse me please reply. Thank you all, you guys rock.

[Cricket]

Hi plywood,

Does the BIOS detect the correct size of the hard drive? Is the hard drive jumpered properly? Is the cable installed correctly (blue to motherboard, black to master and grey to slave)?

Are you using a startup/boot floppy disk or booting to the CD?

What OS are you trying to install?

Cricket

[plywood]

Does the BIOS detect the correct size of the hard drive?

Yes, just checked bios and they read the IDE Primary Master with Capacity of 82 GB.

Is the hard drive jumpered properly?

Yes, it is reading as the primary master so all is jumpered .

installed correctly (blue to motherboard, black to master and grey to slave)?

Not sure how to answer this because mah ribbon cable doesnt have colors besides the red for pin 1 and that is correctly put in. I used the longer end of the Y ribbon to go to my harddrive from IDE1 on my motherboard. I think it is correctly connected, but ill try the other end of the Y.

Are you using a startup/boot floppy disk or booting to the CD?

I actually had to enable Boot Floppy Seek and it auto does the CD-ROM support but i am booting from floppy. when i formatted the first time it said 2megs or something. So i FDISKed and could only come up with 13megs. Formatted that and said 79 available but went to check back in FDISK and under Display said Primary Partition for 13megs. And that was max tried re-partitioning several times.

What OS are you trying to install?

dont laugh. win98se (gaming reasons)

[morriswindgate]

THe FDISK that you are using does not report the drive size correctly. The workaround for this is to FDISK using the WIndows 98 bootdisk and where it ask for the size of the partition use percentages instead of MBYTES. So instead of typing in 78,305 use 100%. Fdisk will still not show the drive size correctly and when you format it may not show correctly. However when you finally get Windows 98 installed the drive will show the correct size, which will be something like 78925 or similiar. ANd you have not lost any space as this is the way windows sees 80 Gigabytes.

[Cricket]

Hi plywood,

The IDE cable connection instructions I gave is for 80 wire UltraATA IDE cables. If you're using a 40 wire ATA33 IDE cable, then it doesn't matter which connector you use...but if your computer is from a PC maker like Compaq or DELL, it may be using cable select IDE cables and you'll have to jumper the drives to CS (cable select). Not sure how you can tell if they are cable select cables except that they may be missing a pin hole in the connector.

Are you shutting down the PC after you're done fdisking? You can't just reset the system, it has to be shut down and restarted.

FDISK & FORMAT

I still use Win98SE .

Cricket

[plywood]

Morriswindgate and Cricket thank u both. It was FDISK lying to me, that's amazing. Never would have thought. Thanks guys.

[mike breck]

Yes, it's a known problem.

However, you can patch FDISK

http://support.microsoft.com/default...EN-US;Q263044&

However, as MWG said, using percentages does the job.