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40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

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Ok – i have been all over the net and still cannot sort out this problem.
About 1 month ago i needed to clean out XP so i decided to format. I formatted and when i went into the screen to setup the installation it showed it would install on a 32 GB partition.Its a 40 GB hd i have. So i installed and Windows displays it as a 31.4 GB HD.
I went to Sony site and downloaded a boot disk that partition. It worked and showed that i had 38 Gbytes but the format the boot disk used was really terrible and my Windows crashed consistenly.

I dont know what i can do. ive tried and reformatted at least 5 times and Windows still only recognises 31 GB. My system is currently running on NTFS…
any Partitioning Toolz that will recover the extra 7 GB ? ? ? its as if 7 GB was just stolen and XP only recognises 31 🙁
ALL help appreciated 😉

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Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

Hi,

What you seem to be having is the The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GiB / 33.8 GB) Barrier, It happens with some Award BIOS’s you will need to update your BIOS, from your manufactories website. Here is more information on that barrier and more.

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

Rick

Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

ok thanks! – i will check that out 😉
Do you possibly know what could have caused the problem. One day XP shows 38 GB and then when i format all of a sudden it showed 31. I didnt fiddle with Bios or anything.. could sum software gave done that.

Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

Maxtor, segate, western digital, and other hard companies have software that can trick the BIOS into thinking that the drive is only 31.5 GB but then in windows it picks it up as the actually size in your case 38GB, maybe this software emulation was installed and when you reformatted you removed the software and in turn, now can only use 31.5 GB because there’s nothing tricking your BIOS now.

Rick

Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

pentz , I strongly advise you that you go into bios settings and do an automatic disk recognition . make sure that the bios returns true head, cyclinder , sector etc values found on the disk . if not go down to user (manually entered ) defined line and input those numbers. YOU must see the correct GB ( nearest 1 GB ) . If the above is not possible , I advise you CHANGE your motherboard if it is an old one . If you wish upgrade the bios .

Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

The most likely thing that has happened here is that there was some software installed to trick the BIOS into seeing the complete drive and not hitting the max Cylinder setting.

As one of the other posters has told you there is software available to trick the BIOS into seeing the entire drive and if it was there previously and not after a reformat and install I would hazard a guess that that piece of software hasn’t been reinstalled.

But I would first Flash the BIOS with the latest available and see if that cures the problem but you’ll have to look in BIOS to see what size drive is being shown and then if it is seeing the full 40 GIG you’ll need something like Partition Magic to increase the size of the drive as it’s already formatted and loaded. At this stage you want to increase the size of the existing partition rather than reloading the system again.

Col

Reply To: 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

In reply to 40 GB shown as 31/2 GB! Help plz

OK WTF!!!!!!
I wanna flash my bios but it seems impossible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is what it is

This file has recorded information useful in identifying the manufacturer
of this motherboard. The information is listed below:

An AMIBIOS ID String Was Detected:
63-0501-000001-00101111-111104-SiS760
– —- —— ——
| | | |
| | | Chipset/BIOS Info
| | BIOS Build Date
| Manufacturer ID
BIOS ROM Information
AMIBIOS ROM Size: 512 KB
BIOS Build Date: Nov 11 2004
Motherboard Manufacturer Code: 0001 Not listed in MAN.DAT file

AMIBIOS Build Tag: AH005001
AMIBIOS Project ID: AH005001 Not listed in TAG.DAT file

——————————————————————————-
SMBIOS info:
Manufacturer : ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Product Name : K8S-MX
Version : Rev 1.xx
Serial Number: MB-1234567890

i dont know how to flash it…..

[Author]

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