Hard drive question

PJ Hunt

OK...
I recently installed a 13 Gb Western Digital IDE..
Now Op Sys tells me its 2.01 Gb...
Partition Magic tells me its actually 4.03 with 2 partitions...

Question is can I repartition it to the full 13 without formatting?
Its FAT32 now so thats not the prob...

Any suggestions?

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‡PJ‡

Leverz

Well no matter what you do you will not get the full 13 gig, since part of the harddrive will be reserved to hold the File Allocation Table, without this noone knows where the files are on the disk

Leverz

sounds like a damaged harddrive btw
;(

WhiteWashMan

no, ive seen this a load of times
you will have to fdisk your drive, hence losing all info. sorry
just delete all partitions in fdisk and create one partition. check if its the full 13 gig. for some reason it will only show up as 2 gig. strange but true
but like i said, fdisk will solve your problem, but your info is gone. dont forget to re format and reinstal windows now

amp

I had my IBM 13 gig formatted to the full 13 when I first got it.

Now I have 6 partitions with fat, fat32, linux, ntfs and about 650mb of unallocated.

Surprising that PQ doesn't see the whole cabodle on your machine. What version of PQ is it? Could be related to your bios (although it'd have to be pretty old) so check out what size your bios thinks it is.

P.s. if anyone offers anyone a cheap Western Digital 8.4 gb drive stay WELL clear. They're dropping like flies.

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Lunacy Abounds! Play GLminesweeper!

[This message has been edited by amp (edited 18-05-2000).]

PJ Hunt

Oh well.....

Gotta be done I spose...thanks for the help guys...

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‡PJ‡

MiCr0

it sounds like a problem one of my friends had.
how many cylinders has it got?

PJ Hunt

Sorry Micro..dont have that info here.
BTW..Should I sat it as Auto, LBA or Large in the BIOS?

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‡PJ‡

koloth

what operating system? If it's NT I'm sure you could use disk administrator to create additional partitions without having to reformat existing patitions

Can't remember if there's an corresponding utility for Win9x

PJ Hunt

Fraid its windoze 98...
Thats why I tried Partition Magic...
But its only seeing 4 Gb which is the weird bit..
I'm resigned to reformatting the whole shebang....

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‡PJ‡

_CreeD_

Your system BIOS might have trouble handling drives over 2Gbm or the next limit which was 8Gb.
Win98 will try to look through the BIOS (a bad attempt at being NT) and might show you more but is still mesing up.
Basically make sure the full 13 Gb is seen in the BIOS, if need be take down the Heads/Cylinders etc. info from the HDD (Usually on a sticker on the drive) and enter them manually into the Hard Drive setup screen.
If all else fails try a BIOS Upgd.

While you can have huge Fat32 parititions it isn't wise to go over 8Gb, you lose the cluster size advantage and it gets unstable.