Hard drive problem

pred racer

Guys/gals, Ive just installed a 20g hard drive as a slave on my primary Ide to use as a backup drive for photos etc, master is an 80g drive.
The bios recognises this as a 20g drive but windows (xp-pro with sp2)
says it is only 7.8Gig??? Im sure this has been done here before but cant seem to find it(or remember)
All help welcome

Karoma

What does Disk Management report?
(Right-click on My Computer->Manage -> Disk Management)

i.e. Does it report 20GB full capacity? Are there multiple partitions? Are all partitions formatted correctly (i.e. FAT/32/NTFS) ..try formatting..

DSLinAbsentia

If it's an SATA driver, this is probably your problem. Well, if you have an ATA it is! You can get a cheapy SATA controller from Komplett.

pred racer

Karoma wrote:

What does Disk Management report?
(Right-click on My Computer->Manage -> Disk Management)

i.e. Does it report 20GB full capacity? Are there multiple partitions? Are all partitions formatted correctly (i.e. FAT/32/NTFS) ..try formatting..

Tried this, and it is reporting it as 7.8g have tried formatting several times to no avail.
also my system now says that it has a 3rd cd-rom a scsi one? I have no scsi gear in my system (haven't had since ide was fast enough to support a 4x cdrw)

its defo an Ide drive, no sata stuff either.

Its a 20 gig seagate barracudaII

originally I had both drives as cable select, but I changed that to 80G drive (maxtor)as master with slave present, and the 20g as slave but nothing changed.

all partitions fornatted correctly

disk management shows 2.44G fat32??
72G (c:) ntfs
7.8G (f:) ntfs


all help welcome.

Orion

Was this disk originally formatted in NT4? NT4 had a disk limit of 7.8gb - and I don't believe in concidences.

Formatting just formats the current partition. From Disk Management remove all partitions from that disk and then create a new partition on it using 100% space - that should give you the full 20Gb.

[edit]Just noticed you said FAT32 as well - that means Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98 or ME. 95 and 98 both had the same 7.gb limit.

btw DSLinAbsentia I doubt there's ever been a 20Gb SATA drive. Disks were up over 100gb before SATA came along. Besides - he did say IDE in the first post

commited

Windows 98 doesnt have a 7gb limit - I had a 15gb drive on 98 years ago.
The lowest SATA drive is 40gb.

Orion

And NT supports higher too but it requires a service pack. I can't remember off the top of my head but 98 and 95 had the same problem as NT with drives higher than 7.8. They will work (up to 137Gb) but there is something. Maybe it was a BIOS limitation.

pred racer

Yes that is the problem, downloaded seagate's diagnostic tools, and it shows up as a 20G drive with a 7.8G partition. How do I get rid of this, windows wont let me do it, all I can do is format the partition, even if I remove the partition it comes back the same. I have some Mbr tools, but A i dont know how to use them and B Im a bit scared of borking my main disk.
anyone know of a simple windows tool to sort out this problem??

And does anyone have any idea where that bloody scsi cd-rom came from

Orion

Won't Disk Management let you remove the partition?

If not get a Windows 98 boot floppy from www.bootdisk.com and run FDISK from it. I think it's option 4 to remove partitions but it's obvious anyway. Just make sure that you're deleting the partition from the proper drive. If you're unsure just take out your main hard disk and then boot from the floppy and remove the partition from the 20gb one. Then you can put back in your main one and boot back into windows to re-partition it.

pred racer

Nope disk management will only let me remove the 7.8g partition, but it still sees the drive as 7.8G so Im back to square 1.

Thats exactly what I was going to do, but I was told (from another source)
that the Nt partition info was held in the mbr and that you need special progs to remove it, I take it that is horse$hit?

Thanks for all the help, I wont be able to try this till the weekend, but ill report back then.

Orion

pred racer wrote:

Thats exactly what I was going to do, but I was told (from another source)
that the Nt partition info was held in the mbr and that you need special progs to remove it, I take it that is horse$hit?

Thanks for all the help, I wont be able to try this till the weekend, but ill report back then.

FDISK will pretty much kill everything. Good luck with it.

SwampThing

Nifty little utility called Delpart out there on the interweb - search for delpart.exe - it'll delete the primary partition off your wife if you want!

smeggle

Put the 20gig disk in as a 'Master' (Disconnect your main 'Master drive during this proceedure). Get the windows 98 floppy as stated, insert to your floppy drive/then boot the computer.

You will be booting from the floppy here but if theres a system on the 20gig it may try to boot from there. If it does enter your bios and 'Force' your boot order to floppy first or just disable all the others alternatively.

So, boot from floppy/you eventually get three options/select the second 'Start without cd-rom support'. (If you have the windows 98 cd select the first option and insert the cd disc - it's actually better to use this option).

Evebtually you will get the A: command prompt. Type 'fdisk' (without speech marks) Select option 4 - the option that allows you to look at the how the drive is physically configured. It should show you how the drive is partitioned.

btw - it's worth mentioning here that you will get an option to treat all drives as large after you type fdisk. It's default is yes and should be left as such.

OK press 'Esc' to exit the drives physical configuration and select option 3 - Delete Partition. You will then need to select a second option out of a list of 4 - select 1 'Delete Primary Dos Partition' Select and follow the instructions. It will give you a warning here 'Are you Sure'? Yes or No (Y or N) yes and thats the partition gone.

OK Now you need a new partition so select option one from the main menu - 'Create Primary DOS Partition' follow the instructions from there. You should now have a primary dos partition of 20gigs. Remeber to make sure you set it at 100% during the primary dos partition creation.

Esc out of fdisk back to A: prompt and type 'restart' computer will restart booting from the floppy again. You need to do a low level format here so when you get back to A: prompt type 'format C:/s' (Remember you only have the 20 gig drive installed at the moment so it is a C: drive).

I can't stress the importance of 'format c:/s' - most just format C: and then wonder why the drive destabalises and acts the bollox later. It's the '/s' part which is the important bit here 'IRRESPECTIVE' that you are later going to re-install this drive as an ntfs slave.

Once that is done, switch of/remove floppy/switch the drive back to a slave/re-connect your master/re-boot and in your disk management (Assuming you do the above correctly) you will see your 20gig drive.

btw - if you had to adjust your boot order - switch it back during first re-boot under your original configuration.

SwampThing

Jes, smeggle, that's a lot of work for something simple.

Really, delpart's yer man.

masteroftherealm

Smeggle likes doing things the hard way.

pred racer

Thanks guys, downloaded delpart, will try that at the weekend, will probably also try the other way coz its nice to be able to do stuff like that, ill get back to yez.

swampthing, if I delete the wifes primary partition, can I reformat her as natalie portman?

SwampThing

lol -

yes, but it requires a very, very, very, low-level format!

pred racer

Oh i get it.. you mean me on my knees for an hour asking her to dress up like her.:D

SwampThing

It's useful to make a bootable floppy from win '98, copy on delpart and a few other bits and bobs - fdisk etc. etc and use this floppy as the source for a bootable CD. Got me out of many a hobble with Natalie Portman's partition!

Maybe I should add this to the 'Top Tips' thread!

pred racer

guys im still in trouble with this, ive followed all the advice above, and windows is still seeing it as 7.8g......dos is now seeing a primary partition of 20g, fdisk says there is only one partition of 20g, delpart says the same, I couldnt do the low level format(I was using an ME boot disk and it says it doesnt support /s commands) this is driving me friggin nuts :mad:

SwampThing

Hmmm, stubborn little bastard, this disk.

Formatting (high or low level) works at partiton level, so I don't think a low level format will fix this - someone will no doubt correct me here.

Try this - use fdisk and/or delpart and remove every partition from the disk. Don't create any partitons and boot Windows and tell us what the Disk Manager sees.

Just one other thing - is it possible that the 7.8GB F: drive is on the 80GB disk as another partiton? I only ask because IDE drives don't usually come in these size increments (72GB) and 72 + 7.8 is awfully like the size an 80GB disk would be when formatted.