fat32 question

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leia176

I've installed many hard drives without any problems. I was walking a
friend through installing a 2nd hard drive over the IM. She bought a 200gb
drive that only seems to be formatting with fat32 as 131gb. She is choosing
the max partition size. She is using Win Me. It's been so long since I've
done it the old DOS way. Is the drive faulty or is there a reason for this
that I'm not thinking of? The drive shows as only 131 gb even unformatted.
Thanks for reading.
 
leia176 said:
I've installed many hard drives without any problems. I was walking a
friend through installing a 2nd hard drive over the IM. She bought a 200gb
drive that only seems to be formatting with fat32 as 131gb. She is choosing
the max partition size. She is using Win Me. It's been so long since I've
done it the old DOS way. Is the drive faulty or is there a reason for this
that I'm not thinking of? The drive shows as only 131 gb even unformatted.
Thanks for reading.
Click to expand...

very possible that it's a bios issue
you may need to get an updated bios or else use a pci controller card that
can
"see" the whole drive

btw: on any fat32 partition over 32 gigs in size you will be wasting a lot
of
space due to very large cluster size...
i'd seriously consider using win2000 or XP
and going with NTFS
 
Thanks philo and Dogbert. Never in a million years would I have thought it
was a BIOS issue. That's probably it.
 
I've installed many hard drives without any problems. I was walking a
friend through installing a 2nd hard drive over the IM. She bought a 200gb
drive that only seems to be formatting with fat32 as 131gb. She is choosing
the max partition size. She is using Win Me. It's been so long since I've
done it the old DOS way. Is the drive faulty or is there a reason for this
that I'm not thinking of? The drive shows as only 131 gb even unformatted.
Thanks for reading.
Click to expand...

The mother board may not support the large drive.Click here,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/hard.html

HTH :)



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leia176 said:
I've installed many hard drives without any problems. I was walking a
friend through installing a 2nd hard drive over the IM. She bought a 200gb
drive that only seems to be formatting with fat32 as 131gb. She is choosing
the max partition size. She is using Win Me. It's been so long since I've
done it the old DOS way. Is the drive faulty or is there a reason for this
that I'm not thinking of? The drive shows as only 131 gb even unformatted.
Thanks for reading.
Click to expand...
+++++
You need to find an IDE adapter/controller card that can recognize
drives larger than 131gb, something like the Promise Ultra100tx2. Also,
be aware that Win9x and WinME need to be patched to ustilize HDD's
larger than 30/40/60 gb, depending on version.
Earl
 
E. Harris said:
+++++
You need to find an IDE adapter/controller card that can recognize
drives larger than 131gb, something like the Promise Ultra100tx2. Also,
be aware that Win9x and WinME need to be patched to ustilize HDD's
larger than 30/40/60 gb, depending on version.
Earl
Click to expand...

Boot disks containing older Win 9.x versions of FDISK only fail to properly
report the drive size, but will still be able to prepare and format this
drive. If making partitions, and not utilizing the entire size of the drive
as one partition, then you would need to use percentages instead of MB's
when creating them :-)
 
There is also a possiblity that the BIOS is not recognizing the larger size
of the hard drive. I'm not sure how old this computer is, but perhaps
flashing the BIOS to the latest version might help.

Patty
 
Is that not a limitation of Fat32.

For my large drive I have had to use NTFS which is supported by W2000 and
SP.

You may have to set the HDD as 2 partitions in FDSIK.

the_gnome
 
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