D: drive

I have done this before, but cannot remember how, nor find my notes either.

But got a free 1.6 G W.D. hard drive. Back when it was running on some Win 95 machine. Now I want to use it to become a D: drive on a DOS or 3.1 based system. I want to bust it up into in to three or four partitions. Thus becoming D:, E:, F:, and maybe G: drives. Drive at Boot up is reporting to be a CHS type, even though it is a W.D. This drive also has a jumper. Do I leave off, set to Slave, to Master?

Using FDISK I deleted the Primary drive. Then had it create another one. This time it says need to create a Primary once again, and then it immediately limits me to 504 MB. It will not allow me to create another drive of any size. I can only partition off a chunk of the 504 MB. That leaves quite a bit of unused space.

I used to have notes on how to, but how do I now partition this drive into more than one. I have set the jumper to CS, MAST., SLAVE, and off. Nothing seems to change a thing.

Do I have to partition this drive on a Win 95 or Win 98 machine? or can I do it on the 3.1?

I would also presume that after each of the partitions is created, then to format each of them one at a time.

William

you need to set the hdd jumper to slave and have it on the second spot on the ribbon cable then fdisk it and clear all parttions including the non DOS partions then you can partion the drive and should be able to see all of it.

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...

I tried going by the first method noted three times now. First thing it wants to do is re-partition my C: drive. Doesn't look at the D: drive. Sort of refuses to look over there. But I can do a DIR, and everything on the C: drive pops up for examination.

On the second method, as outlined via Webby at the Microsoft web-site. waht is there mainly pertains to more modern systems and I can get only so far on a Win 98 computer. It reads better, easier, but when in going over to FDISK the new bigie drive, it comes up with error message of incompatible DOS version. Then cannot get any further. Have to EXIT then.

Wm.

You don't mention the CPU but if it's a 486 it's likely the bios can't see a drive larger than the 504 meg.

Check #1 under 'Seven Major BIOS Limitations' here:

http://www.buildorbuy.net/bioslimit...

IF the drive is recognised correctly in BIOS then FDISK will work wether it is MS-DOS5/5 or WinDOS, subject to the maximum size of drive FDISK can cope with !

If the BIOS can not recognise the drive because it is a larger capacity than the BIOS can handle. Then look for a Drive Overlay Utility Software from the manufacturer of the drive.

Better than an overlay, get an IDE controller.

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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

M2

No the BIOS recognizes it just fine. At DOS prompt can go to the D: drive but no further.

The computers it has been tried on are from first generation Pentium and more modern. Thus they recognise it right off. Don't have a working 486 any more.

And one of those handy-dandy partitioners said to download it on to a floppy disk. It is near to two meg before the download, how is that supposed to fit?

Wm.

What's the model # of the drive? It may have a cylinder limiting jumper. The 504 meg size indicates the bios is only seeing 1024 cylinders. Some early pentiums--particularly IBM--couldn't see beyond 1024 either. But if you tried it on several computers and got the same results then I guess the fault is not a bios limitation.

Play around with how it's configured in cmos/bios setup. Set its MODE to LBA. Try AUTO as the type. Try configuring it manually with the C/H/S numbers.

I know there were some early pentium bios' that had problems recognizing drives in the 1 gig range. They would see the drives as 504. Once I did a low level format on a Quantum drive that wasn't being seen right by fdisk. After that I had no problems with it. I used MAXLLF. You have to be sure to specify LBA if you use it.

If you do decide to use an overlay I can send you a floppy boot image of the WD version.