New Hard Drive not being recognized

The problem is with your BIOS or BIOS settings. Some manufacturers, such as Western Digital, have installation utilities that will test your BIOS to see if it will recognize the full size of your new, large drive. If not, they typically provide a translation utility to let the older IDE adapter see the full size of the drive. Alternatively, you can buy a new IDE adapter card for about $50 and disable the onboard adapter. The advantage of that approach is that you can take advantage of ADA/66 or ADA/100 technology that might be built into your new drive, thus allowing greater throughput.

The first answer is true but if you dont want to put out the money you can use fdisk and partition the drive in to 2 gig sections. Or use a drive manager to use the whole drive. Almost all hard drive makers offer drive managers.

>...converted the drive to Fat 32...

The key to the puzzle is that you have CONVERTED your partition to FAT32. Though this will increase the volume of data that can be stored on the partition, it does not increase the size of the partition. (Windows recognizes partitions as hard drives.)

In order to gain use of the whole hard drive as one partition, re-partitioning is required. If you use the Windows FDISK to repartition, you will lose all data already on the drive. There are other partitioning programs that can partition your hard drive without losing the data already on it. Partition Magic and Partition-it are two names of partitioning software of that nature that come to mind.

> ...the drive is recognized as 10gb but when I get into windows it is only being recognized as a 2 gb drive.Is this a Windows problem?

Microsoft would say, "no." It's my belief, though, that any operating system should include basic disk management utilities such as is required for partitioning, defragmenting, etc. I'm not sure that every operating system should be required to have a Web browser, Web TV, or picture editing software included. ...Just my opinion...

Dear Dean,
I have seen a similar problem before. If the
BIOS is recognizing and showing the drive as 10GB, then the problem is in DOS.
Try booting the computer with a floppy boot disk. Use FDisk and check the partition size
(that's option 4) of the partition. If it shows 2,048MB, that's your problem. On some systems, windows will limit itself to the first 1024 cylinders (2GB). Especially, if you are loading an OEM OS without formatting the disk first.
If this is the situation, you have 2 alternatives to fix it. 1) While you are in FDISK remove the partition, reboot using the "boot with CD support" option and repartition in FDISK. After you remake the partition, reboot and format the drive. (The
Format utility will be on a different drive from A: & C:, watch as the system boots as to the drive letter of the "Diagnostic Tools".) Then reload all of your OS and programs. 2) You other option is to get a partition management program like Partition Magic. It will let you rearrange/resize partitions without the loss of data.
Let me know how this does you.

Dear Dean,
I have seen a similar problem before. If the
BIOS is recognizing and showing the drive as 10GB, then the problem is in DOS.
Try booting the computer with a floppy boot disk. Use FDisk and check the partition size
(that's option 4) of the partition. If it shows 2,048MB, that's your problem. On some systems, windows will limit itself to the first 1024 cylinders (2GB). Especially, if you are loading an OEM OS without formatting the disk first.
If this is the situation, you have 2 alternatives to fix it. 1) While you are in FDISK remove the partition, reboot using the "boot with CD support" option and repartition in FDISK. After you remake the partition, reboot and format the drive. (The
Format utility will be on a different drive from A: & C:, watch as the system boots as to the drive letter of the "Diagnostic Tools".) Then reload all of your OS and programs. 2) You other option is to get a partition management program like Partition Magic. It will let you rearrange/resize partitions without the loss of data.
Let me know how this does you.
As a final note, check for a BIOS upadate that will ensure that your drive is recognized in it's full(er) capacity(some of the older systems can't see more than 8GB even with a BIOS update), as well as a driver patch from the drive manufacturer for the BIOS limitation.

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