Only showing 32GB of a 80gb Harddrive Win98

axer

Hi,
I replaced my 8gb harddrive and put in a samsung 80GB hardrive. Installed win98 and chose "Yes, Use large drive support". Installed etc. i updated and installed everything only to notice now that it is showing the drive as 32GB. i know there is a limition about this in win98. What do i do?
I have partition expert installed.

Thanks,
Noel.

quarryman

is it an IDE drive? Do you have a pin jumper set to only allow 32GB at the back. I'vee seen this happen before.

axer

spot on quarryman, ur on the ball. Thanks. Just hope i can just increase the partition size now without reformatting.

axer

except now it hangs on detecting the drives (on slave/master & cable select). Im thinking that maybe the bios needs to be updated?

quarryman

will it boot when its set to master and its the only drive. ie you have the win98 cd in the drive (and it gets to windows setup)>

Inspector Gadget

Three things that might be relevant:
1) It's somewhat unlikely, but possible, that your computer is old enough that it doesn't understand drives of larger than 32GB (that was the last 'big' barrier before people started banging heads off 137GB). If you're using a very old machine, this is possible; most PentiumIIs and later should be fine. Check what size the computer's BIOS thinks it is to verify this (remember, remove any size-limiting jumpers and stuff)
2) I think the Windows installer has a serious issue with creating FAT32 partitions of more than 32GB. It's definitely true of the Win2k and XP installers; don't know about 98/Me, but it seems likely. You may have more joy by formatting the disk and creating the partition using something other than the windows setup program...
3) Some stuff that I've googled in the last couple of minutes leads me to believe that Win98 won't recognise partitions of more than 32GB in size no matter what you try (it's possible to create larger FAT32 partitions with third-party software alright, for all the good it'll do, apparently), so you may want to consider a three or more smaller partitions so as to be able to make use of the whole drive?

Hope this helps,
Gadget

axer

Yes it boots with just the CDROM plugged in and loads win98 setup. It will boot fine with harddrive installed and CDROM installed when the harddrive is set to 32GB limit. Any more ideas?

Hobbes

Isn't there a physical limit to the size of a drive in w98? been so long since I have seen w98

astrofool

whats the spec of the machine? Might be an idea to load win2k if it can take it, win98 is getting a little long in the tooth at this stage.

axer

ok sorry boards.ie was down so i couldnt post. I went onto the hp website asked 1 of the online technitions. They said that the most that the hp brio BA600 can take is 32GB. There was only 1 bios update but that did not address the issue so i guess i will just have to leave the jumpers on to limit it to 32gb. Bit of a waste of 48GB all the same. Thanks for yeer advice.
Inspector Gadget you were right, tx.

Chalk

thats wierd for a pc thats so new,
piii is it?

are you sure its not windows, that wont make partitions bigger that 32gig?
maybe hp support were fobbing you off?
does fdisk show 32gigs aswell?

Standard Toaster

One option is to get a el cheapo PCI hdd controller thus bypassing the chipset limitation on the mobo.

astrofool

32gig is a bios limit, not a windows one. windows limit was 2gb for fat16, back in the day, and then 137gig for xp non-sp1.

Inspector Gadget

Eh, you'll find that the 137GB limit wasn't actually (or at least wasn't _just_) a "windows" limitation per se; it was (for most of us with ATA33/66/100 controllers as opposed to exclusively ATA133, SATA or SCSI) a disk controller issue. Disks of larger than this figure need LBA48 addressing, which means that the controller is capable of splitting the disk into 2^48 individually addressable chunks (the exact number of chunks required is determined by the disk's geometry; if the controller can't issue read/write commands with the required granularity, it can't use the disk (or at least it can't use all of it). This is why the size-limiting jumpers exist on hard disks; applying the jumper changes the geometry the disk reports, which allows controllers to use at least some of the drive's capacity.

Being a relative "old timer" at this sort of thing, I can remember there being a few of these occasions; there was one at 32GB (I think this would have been 28-bit LBA addressing), and one at ~8GB (was it 8.4GB? can't remember exactly), and I think the one before that was 504MB.

Look seriously at buying a cheap IDE controller; most are bootable (if your BIOS has a "Boot from SCSI" option, that's what you'll need to pick) and you can use the whole disk?

Hope this helps,
Gadget

axer

Thats great, Thanks for all yeer advice. I will look into getting an IDE controller.

Chalk

http://www.google.ie/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm&e=10167

i was thinking of something else ^^^^

astrofool

what I meant really was that 137gig was one that did relate to windows, other limitations were purely from a bios point of view, 137gig needed large drive support enabled in the OS, and on the bios.

Windows itself was not at fault for the 8/32gb limits.

Chalk

windows98 was fine,

xp and 2000 wont make fat32 partitions bigger than 32gB so i got my wires crossed.
thats where i got the windows issue from.

hostyle

All you need is partitioning software better than the default Windows ones. Partition Magic will do it, but is non-free. Ranish Partition Manager is free but can be confusing for novices.

Chalk

nah, im fine

it was posting it as a possible cause of the problem,
i use partition magic or fdisk / cfdisk if i need to do anything like that.

Inspector Gadget

I can't say I've done it myself, but I'm told that formatting a drive with a size-limiting jumper fitted and then removing the jumper and trying to resize it makes a bit of a mess of things - then again, that could have been bad luck on the part of the only person I've seen try it

Assuming you're starting from scratch, axer, a Windows 98 boot disk (with FORMAT and FDISK on it) will do just fine in creating an 80GB single partition; remember to remove the jumper first

Like astrofool says, there is a software limitation on many flavours of Windows (unless you've got a recent enough version or service pack to fix it) that limits the size of drives to 137GB; XP SP1 is okay, Windows 2000 SP3 is okay, Win98 isn't . Actually, to add insult to injury, the standard Win98 (first and second editions) FDISK tool has problems with disks that are larger than 64GB (it misreports their sizes); there's a fixed version at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044 that you can use instead. Remember, Win98 has no problem creating large FAT32 partitions; it's just the setup program that has a canary when it comes to creating (but not using pre-existing) FAT32 partitions of larger than 32GB. Problem still exists in the 2000 and XP versions, oddly...

Happy hunting...
Gadget

duridian

Hey Axer, I spotted this on the For Sale forum, it might provide a cheap way for you to get use of all the space on your hard drive.

Generic ATA100 PCI Dual Channel IDE adapter. - €10

axer

Inspector Gadget wrote:

Assuming you're starting from scratch, axer, a Windows 98 boot disk (with FORMAT and FDISK on it) will do just fine in creating an 80GB single partition; remember to remove the jumper first

The problem lies in the fact that the computer freezes on detecting the harddrive with the 32GB limit jumper off, so i cant even boot the computer with the selector pin off. So I dont think i will be able to make an 80gb partition, unless you mean with the controller card. Just about to sort myself out for 1 now.

Thanks every1 for yeer help & thanks duridian for spotting that card.

Inspector Gadget

Yep, I do mean with the controller card

Gadget