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Fdisk hard drives, cant see full disk
Name: CHEETAH Date: December 5, 2000 at 13:43:22 Pacific
Comment:
I have 2 hard drives in my system. One is a 14 gig and the other a 3.5 gig. When I partitioned the 14 gig, DOS is only showing it as an 8 gig. Wheres the rest?
Name: SuperTech Date: December 5, 2000 at 17:52:43 Pacific
Reply:
Chances are, if you are in a dos forum, you are running with a pretty old motherboard/bios(more than a year old). What you need to do is go to the manufacturer of your pc/motherboard/bios and see if you can either get an upgrade for your bios, or if you REALLY have to, install the mbr software that came with your drive, ez-bios or maxblast, whatever. Your problem is that the bios cannot, er willnot see a drive over 8 GB. Hope this helps, ST
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Response Number 2
Name: CHEETAH Date: December 5, 2000 at 19:01:07 Pacific
Reply:
The bios was already upgraded when the new hard drive was installed. Before I wiped it out, Windows 98 was reading it as a 14 gig. Now I Fdisked it and formatted it and fdisk only reads it as 8 gig. I went ahead and installed 98 anyway and its showing it as an 8 gig hard drive.
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Response Number 3
Name: fred6008 Date: December 5, 2000 at 21:26:25 Pacific
Reply:
Are sure Windows saw the whole drive. How did it do that? It is just like a BIOS problem anyway. Another solution in addition to MAXBLAST or whatever is to get a 66 or 100 MCS hard drive controller which has its own BIOS. Back when BIOS values went from 540 Megabytes to 8.4 Gigabytes it was not possible to get a replacement BIOS chip for the motherboard. A MAXBLAST type file that loaded in the Config.sys or a controller board was the only way short of a new motherboard back then.
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Response Number 4
Name: DoOMsdAY Date: December 6, 2000 at 05:37:50 Pacific
Reply:
Was there a large disk manager on the disk before (ie EZ-BIOS or whatever it's called) that is no longer showing its presence during boot. EZ-BIOS and its friends allow you to circumvent the 8 GB limit imposed by some BIOS'.
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Response Number 5
Name: CHEETAH Date: December 6, 2000 at 05:57:40 Pacific
Reply:
Yes there is an EZ bios present when the computer boots up. Also, large disk support is enabled.
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Response Number 6
Name: Calispell Date: December 6, 2000 at 09:37:38 Pacific
Reply:
EVen with large disk support, FDISK will only show the first 8 GB of a drive.
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Response Number 7
Name: DoOMsdAY Date: December 7, 2000 at 15:50:48 Pacific
Reply:
Ok, first of all reinstall EZ-BIOS to make sure something hasn't hurt that. Then, download a 98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and use that for your fdisk. It sounds most probably that you're using an older version of fdisk that doesn't support beyond the 8 GB limit. (Back then the BIOS' didn't either, so why let fdisk do that?) Still, the EZ-BIOS installation is a safety precaution.
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