Win98 se won't recognize all 40 G of HD

A maxtor 40 G HD was installed on a P3 w/ an (old) asus MB.
This was an upgrade (the hard drive) before my arrival. Windows 98 was installed on it. The bios did not recognize the full drive. A new motherboard, CPU, and memory were installed... thus a new bios (just yesterday). The new bios recognizes the drive correctly, as does fdisk, reporting a single partition of the correct size. Upon booting windows and installing all MB drivers and such, Win98 still reports the drive as 6.15GB, the same as before the MB update.

My diagnostics through maxtor utilities reported all well with the drive and their support stated that this is a 'Windows' issue. My question is whether there is a known method of getting the operating system to recognize the full drive without re-formatting and re-installing wuindows??

Thank you

Craig Jensen

 

Go into Control Panel, System, click on Device Manager tab. Remove all the Hard Disk Controllers, under Disk Drives remove the Generic IDE Disk Type XX. Shut down and reboot.

 

This sounded like it would do the job... however, the drive remains only 6.15 GB in Windows and 40 GB otherwise (in the Bios, and from Command Promt outside of windows.

In Win98 I am unsure of the method the OS uses to translate the drive parameters... registry, system file/files... ??

This is really an odd situation. One I have never seen before. Anyway, I am likely to go ahead with a format and re-install unless someone has an idea of what may correct this issue...

BTW, Thank you for your help

Craig Jensen

 

I went ahead and formatted the drive and, as I expected, it did then recognize the full capacity of the drive.

I am still puzzled as to whether there is a way to make Windows readdress the drive translation and see it as what it is.

Interestingly, when I ran several data recovery utilities in win98 before the format and re-install, they recognized the full 40G of drive. But Win98 never did... until re-formatting. I suspect there may have been a way by directly editing the drive (partition table/mbr) with something like Norton's Diskedit, but in this instance, it was not worth the effort.

Thanks for the replies.

Craig Jensen

 

after you run fdisk you have to format again. run fdisk and when it is done. then format the drive. then you will get all of your drive space.



Mike

 

Check the BIOS settings for the hard drive. Does the BIOS recognise the larger drive? If not then you will need to download the latest patch from the motherboard manufacturer's web site and reflash the BIOS. A reflash program should also be available at the same web site.

 

Instead of re-fdisking & formating, there are two other options (that I'm aware of, there may be more). They both involve 3rd party software:

1) Use a partitioning program such as Partition Magic. After installing, this program allows the partitions to be resized without using fdisk.

2) This one's a bit tougher. Temporarily install a second hard drive. Use a drive copy program such as Ghost to copy the original drive to the second drive. Use the same program to immediately copy the data back to the first drive, this time choosing to adjust the partition size to use the entire hard drive. Some of the free drive copy programs from the hard drive manufacturers will do this.

Editing the MBR should do the trick too, but it's beyond what I can do

edited to add quote

 

I also have a ASUS motherboard. Just do what I said and you will not have any more problems