hello all, i have a 6GB SEAGATE HD formatted and partitioned for win and linux zillion times, and now it happened to be unpartitioned, each time i run a zero fill utility from a DOS bootable floppy, it says that the capacity of my HD is 475MB!! only How is that?? I though that those utilities wld read the real phisical capaciy and directly no matter what... What should i do?

What does BIOS say about the HD? M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

When DOS was written hdd's were only small capacity and it was not taken into account how much larger they would become. Thus today DOS itself cannot 'see' all the capacity of the large hdd's that are now available. Go to the hdd makers website and download their disc manager ovelay program which overcomes this problem. You do no advise why you require to zero fill or llf (which is a different process), but again the hdd makers website should provide. Good Luck - Keep us posted.

First & foremost is how the BIOS sees the drive - although a 6Gb drive should be fine on a 233MHz machine "a DOS bootable floppy," My, that's not exactly descriptive - there are all sorts of DOS around - some aren't capable of seeing large drives properly, true. 475Mb is a pretty odd number- either the drive has been oddly partitioned, or (more likely) has some serious errors preventing its true capacity from being seen Run the zero fill (or the manufacturer's version) and then (with the appropriate version of fdisk) see if the drive can be partitioned to its true capacity Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid. -John Wayne