Desktop

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Computer will not read Large H/Drive

0 helpful
11 replies

by john.thierry 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
My daughter has a 486 100 Pentium Computer. For some unknown reason, it will not read the correct size Hard drive. It did have a 518 megabite Hard drive in it, but it crashed and was unable to fix. I purchased for myself a 20 Gig H/drive and put theone from my machine into hers. It was a 1.2Gig. At first, it was reading correctly, but my daughter did something and now I am unable to force it to read correctly. I have already put the LBA on Large, but as it boots up, it just hangs. There is nothing wrong with the H/drive itself as it works fine in my machine. In the 486, it keeps coming up with 'Not enough space, Delete some files to free up Disk space'. it jusy shows 521Megabites. What else can I do to fix this, without having to purchaseor update my daughter's Computer? She only uses it for School work and making charts for School. She also has to do certain work on her Computer for Home work, as she uses a Computer as part of Learning. Your help will be Greatly apriciated, Thank You.

11 replies

by slim_jim_tx

What does it read in the BIOS? If it reads the correct size, then you might try this: get you a windows boot up disk and boot up to it and run a scandisk. If this does not work. Try to slave her drive on your machine and see if it reads the right size, if not you will have to fdisk her drive and start from scratch. Before you do this you will need to back up her personal data, a good time to do this is when you have her drive slaved with yours. (If you need to know how to slave a drive just email me). Another possibility is that she has a virus on her pc. You need a bootable virus floppy disk, and boot up her machine and run a virus scan on all of her files.

Also, in the BIOS just hit the setup defaults option and see if this works too.

Good luck!

by walter_loh

The only thing you can do is to update the Mainboard bios ! As most 486 & Pentium read only maximum 8.4 some 10.2 Gb Hdd

by musicman2000uk2001

When usin FDISK ensure that large disk support is enabled otherwise this will limit the size of the disks you can create and therefore the formatted size of the disk will be decreased.

by dan

instead of using fdisk. Try using PartitionMagic. This is less pervasive and won't destroy the files that you have on the drive.

by zlitocook

The new hard drive should have had a drive manager floppy with it. A drive manager will alow a large hard drive where the bios wont. You attach the hard drive and boot to the floppy and follow the directions. I have done this more times then I can count with out a problem. If you did not get one go to the hard drive web site and down load it.

This discussion is closed to new replies.