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Incorrect Hard Drive Capacity

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9 replies

by klk

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Got a question for all... A friend of mine has a Dell PC running Win XP Home Edition. Recently installed a second hard drive, Windows recognizes both of them (they are both 80 GB), but is incorrectly reporting the capacity of one as only 2GB. Anyideas?

9 replies

by budthegrey

Make sure the BIOS settings for the second hard drive are correct; check the LBA setting, among others.

by ^trix

sounds like your friend partitioned the drive in FAT16 which only has a maximum of 2gig. have em repartiton it using large disk support (FAT32). that will fix the problem

by daniel c.

You need to reformat the second HD. In Win XP, here is how you do it.

1) go to control panel
2) choose "performance and maintenance"
3) choose "administrative tools"
4) choose "computer management"
5) in the left hand column, choose "disk management
6) delete the existing partition of the second HD
7) create new partition and format it with either FAT32 or NTFS.

by opatzg9

One other possibility is even though the system recognizes a drive being present, it does not recognize the entire drive. There is normally drive software to overide bios limitations at each of the major hard disk manufactureers web sites. IBM uses ontrac, western digital uses Rocket,...
If that is Samsung go to:
http://www.samsungelectronics.com/hdd/support/utilities/utilities_01.html
If Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html
If Maxtorr
http://www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/software/maxbl ast/default.htm
One other thing of note my ibm80 gig had a jumper to limit it to 32gig, make sure that isn't set.
Good luck

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