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hard drive wrong size

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5 replies

by chester peterson

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I have an old pentium pc with a 10gb hard drive, or so I thought. The machine had a lot of registry errors so I went to format the hd using Fdisk. First thing I noticed was the partition was on a non dos partition so it wouldnt let me format. I erased the partition and created new dos partition chosing Y for large support. Now the Hard drive has a maximum of 2Gb and there is no number physically on the hard drive.
Why is this so?

5 replies

by thechas

You have a motherboard with a 2GB hard drivew size limit.

The reason fdisk saw a non-dos partition is because a drive overlay program was installed to allow full capacity of the drive to be used.

You can either download and use the drive overlay program from the drive mfg.

Or install a PCI IDE controller card.
For $30 or less, you can have the full capacity of the drive available.

Chas

by mdelyea

The Chaz is probably correct regarding your problem, but there are a couple other things to try. First, at the DOS prompt type "fdisk /mbr" without the quotes, this will clean any drive overlay software. Next retry fdisking. If you still get the same result try finding your motherboard model (usually located in the BIOS string displayed along the bottom of your screen during the POST). Go to Google and do a search for your motherboard model and add "BIOS update" to the search. If there is an update, download it along with the appropriate flashing software and flash your BIOS. This may give you access to larger drives than 2GB. A word of warning -->> incorrectly flashing your BIOS may make your computer unusable <<--, so make SURE you read the directions carefully!

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