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Hard Drive reporting error

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I am running WIN ME and I have a 18GIG HDD. The system only reports a 2GIG. How do I correct this?

9 replies

by dmiles

The motherboard Bios may not support a large hard drive and it needs to be updated
Boot computer,when startup screens appears pause the scren and read the info in upper left corner to determine the bios release date ,this will determine if the Biosneeds to be updated,if year listed go to bios manufacturer web site and down load the flash bios .exe file and read notes to flash bios.

by custombytes

I checked the manufacturer for updated BIOS and there werent any. I didnt have problems with size reporting until after I had to reformat.

by alpha-male

If you formatted it under DOS, it uses FAT16 which has a maximum partition size of 2GB. What you should do is boot to you ME CD (or a windows boot disk from www.bootdisk.com) and re- fdisk the drive. Create new partitions and format it FAT32.

Sometimes the issue is with your system BIOS (and it wouldn't hurt you to upgrade it if a newer one is available)...but in this case I'm betting it's a FAT16 problem.

Good luck...hope this helps!

by custombytes

This helped, but it took a longer process since my Windows CD would not allow formatting. It was really strange.

by d_v ant

Another thing to consider is some drives have a jumper on them to limit them to 2.1 GB for backwards compatibility with older motherboards. Make sure this jumper is removed if there is one on your drive. NOTE: This is not the jumper that sets the drive as master/slave/cable select, however, it is usually located in the same general area.....

by fred07

In BIOS, make sure you are in auto detect Hard Drives, Or if user defined, Make sure the correct info is there. If while you are there, there is no user difine for 20gig, THEN you will have to update your BIOS by, either a maxblaster or Western Digital Lifeguard boot disk. Those may be found on their sites. IF the above does not work THEN you will have to update bios. Remember to BACKUP your current BIOS so YOU CAN REINSTALL it if anything goes wrong.

by custombytes

The BIOS was set to autodetect and is up-to-date since the manufacturer does not have updates for my board.

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