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Drive won't format to full capacity

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11 replies

by jwagner45

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Recently my hard drive crashed. I ran Fdisk and reformatted it but I can only get 503MB out of it (it's a 3.2GB drive). I have done this in the past and I remember being asked if I wanted to enable large drive support (or something like that) when running either fdisk or format but I didn't get that option no matter how many times I ran these programs. I even tried using different Windows 98 SE startup disks to fdisk and format the drive. My BIOS sees the whole 3.2GB.

It's got to be something simple that I'm missing but I can't figure it out.

Anyone have any suggestions?

11 replies

by ilo

Don't know what's wrong but try downloading HD utility. ie. seagate, maxtor, etc...

they can usually tell you if your hd messed up, and they also partition and format your hd...very very quickly i might add.

by bohicam1

Have you checked to see if there was a "non-dos" partition on the drive? When running fdisk you can check for it.
Good luck!

Mike

by gigelul

Hi,
I think that you use a MS-DOS version of fdisk. Download a boot diskette from www.bootdisk.com and before create partitions as you wish, delete all old partitions and reboot computer.
Also verify in BIOS if you HDD was detected with LBA options enabled.
Other posibility is if your BIOS can't recognize large disks. You use in the past some patch driver from manufacturer of the HDD?

by emotion

Hi! Are you useing the correct version of Fdisk? You must use the version supplied with Windows 98 or Me. This version will ask you about large disk support.

Good luck!

by shawn at white tiger computer services

Instead of using the basic FDisk command, try FDisk /mbr. It will appear that nothing happened but when the command prompt returns, use the basic FDisk command and go in and try to partition the drive again.

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