Hardware

Ask something
Question Locked

Wrong size Hard Drive in win98se.

0 helpful
5 replies

by shane t.

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

This is my third attempt at obtaining an answer to this problem, I have this here Dell Optiplex GX1,running win98se.
C:\ is 5Gb, I installed a 40Gb hard drive and the system reports it as only 5Gb.
I tried a bios flash, nothing.
At this point this has become a mission of sorts, I am determined to make this work.
I know from the documentation that this system is supposed to support drives much larger than 40Gb, so that where I get lost.
Whats causing this system to read the hard drive inaccuratly?
I did try to place a dvd on the hard drive, it would not fit, so it really is only allowing 5Gb of storage.
Is there a trick I don't know about?(Im sure theres many), or maybe a jumper I missed?

I even reinstalled the os.

Any Takers?

Shane

5 replies

by oh smeg

If that is right you are then hit with a 32 GIG Upper Limit supported by 98.

Though the 5 GIG Upper Limit seriously sounds like a BIOS controlled upper limit that you need to work around but once you get around that you will be stuck with the OS inspired Upper Limit which you can not get around.

If this is something caused by BIOS you can either use a Drive Makers Utility to trick BIOS into seeing a different size or use a Plug in PCI to IDE or SATA Card to install the bigger drives.

Col

by shane t.

You hit it on the head, Bios reports the Hard Drive as EIDE and the correct size, so Win98 is the problem.

Ok, now with that out of the way, does Windows 2000 have the same upper limit on Hard drives?
If not, I will wipe the disk and install it on c:\ then install the larger drives.

Thanks for the reply, I have not messed wth older windows progs in so long, I forgot more than I remember.

Ya know, back BEFORE the internet, BBS boards and such....

by dan.cox

It has been a long time since I worked with Windows 98 but I remember there was an OS that would not install on anything larger than 5GB or thereabouts.
So what we did was install the system and then use Symantec Ghost to take an image of that system. Then we put the image back onto the machine and specify a larger partician.
This overcomes the inability of 98 installing on a larger partician.

by shane t.

Dan,
Thanks for the tip, Partition Magic did the trick.
I have the full 40GB drive now.
This took lees time to fix the partition then it did to install the software.. (almost).

I wonder how far I can go.... I think I will try a 160Gb, and then a 360Gb... :)

Thanks again to everyone.

Shane

This discussion is closed to new replies.