Hard drive problems

Spaceman

I originally put this in Ms apps/OS but bubbles said more peeps would see it in here.

I have an old machine which the Hard Drive went on
its a P200, 64meg ram, I took it to a shop where a
guy put in a 20 gig hard drive, to make sure it would work
in it, and it did so i bought one. Its a Western Digital WD200
20gig. So i took it home and installed in the machine but its
only coming up in the bios as size 1754 and when i go into Win98 its sayin that its only 1.8gig.

Ive done a few things to try n fix it - I flashed the bios up to the latest version (The mobo is a chaintech 5TDM2) and did fdisk and deleted the partition and set it to maximum size before i formatted the drive again. Fdisk says its got only 1 partition of 1673mbytes size, and has usage of 100%

i messed about with the cylinders/heads/tracks and put them up as high as i could, but then i got an error about not having a valid fat32 partition. I stuck it into a different machine (p700 win98) as a slave and formatted with fdisk (with large disk support) from windows but its still comin up as a 2 gig drive.

tis doin me bleedin head in

sceptre

WD have a firmware upgrade for many of their drives (I've 2 WD drives in my comp)

Have a look on the website - I know there's a link from the Compaq support site for all the WD drives if it's not that obvious on the Wd site - if you can't find a link post back and I'll look for the link

And have a look at http://www.wdc.com/support/download/dlg/dlgdiag.zip

Diagnostic thingie for WD drives from my bookmarks

And
http://www.westerndigital.com/support/dlg/onlinedlg.asp
(online diagnostic)

_CreeD_

If your system does not support the drive size (Probably had a 2gb or 8.4gb max) then you can usually get a software manager from the manufacturer to let you overcome this.

Spaceman

Got it sorted out, as a last resort i took the battry out of the mobo and put it back in and for some reason after that it saw it as a 20gig!!?? Damnd if i know why

Thanks for the help lads