Hello,

I'm running win2k with A04 bios. I just installed a new 120 gig HD. However, under my computer, it is recognized as 32gig. How do i fix it to have the full capacity? I think one way is to partion the drive into 4x 30gig HDs, but that is my last resort. If anyone has had this problem or know how to fix it, please do tell.

Thanks
-Amit

PS - I have a 12gig HD set to master and the 120 gig HD set to slave (on same EIDE cable).

This is a BIOS limitation. What motherboard do you have? If there is a more recent BIOS for your board you will need to update it. If theres not you could try entering the hard drive's parrametres manually. (in the BIOS goto CMOS setup, then for primary master select USER) Get this info by searching on google or by going to the manufacturer's website.

From the look of it...I think Amit has an old dell! hehe...the A04 bios? hmmm. Well...yes it is definately a BIOS limitation or you have partitioned silly upon installation of that drive. Update your BIOS for better LBA support and make sure those two kind of drives can exist on the same IDE cable...like for PIO and DMA characteristics and such. This is a slim one...but u can also check for firmware updates on that old drive. Remember HDDs have controller cards built onto them.

You're right! My dell is about 4 years old :)
I upgraded my bios (through flashbios) from A04 to A11. I did some minor research and i'm pretty sure that it is OKAY for both HDDs to exist on the same IDE cable.

WIth my research, i also discovered the manuel settings for the new hdd (sectors, LBA, etc). However, under my bios, those options didn't change. for example, the max sectors i can have is 16, where as it should be a much higher number.

When i go to change for the manuel settings of the 120GB, it says 32gb size. I cannot change that figure. Nor do i have extra settings to change it manuelly.

Thanks for all help
-Amit

I don't think this is a BIOS limitation. Windows 2000 will artificially limit the size of FAT32 partitions to 32GB (this is M$'s way of steering people away from FAT32 to NTFS). So, if you set up your partitions within Windows 2000, AND you use FAT32, that is probably the problem. You may be able to use Partition Magic to extend the or(if you want to use FAT32) make your partitions with a Win98 DOS bootdisk and just use fdisk. Otherwise use NTFS (if you're using FAT32 now), NTFS has no such barrier under W2K.

If you determine this is the problem and you want to set up your partitions with a 9x bootdisk, I'd use an ME bootdisk from bootdisk.com. You may have trouble doing this with some older 9x bootdisks.

I don't know about Win2000 but I have a 120GB HD on Win98 working fine! Get the Microsoft patch for fdisk to partition. Since you have Win2000 I wouldn't apply the patch but open the file (in WinZip) & extract fdisk.98g (the Win98 patch) or fdisk.98s (the Win98SE patch) & either rename your current fdisk to something else & put this there or call this something different (fdisk98.exe or fdisk98s.exe) & type that to partition instead. I would think your fdisk could partition right but I guess not. Make sure you answer Yes to enable large disk support. & maybe you should buy a controller card (I did). My previous post applies to your problem (also click the more info link at the bottom after you read that page).

o boy. boojum...i'm sorry guy that simply is not true. win2k will take large drives in FAT32. I've loaded a bunch on 80Gigs. I do agree with you guys it is no so crucial what the BIOS says as long as in the OS it has the full drive recognized. Basically if you already have a load on the drive, i would recommend taking it off...back up or copy over to ur small boot drive. Then try repartioning under ur flashed BIOS or u may need EZ-BIOS which is a BIOS emulating setup that will handle large drives. Also it is tough manually editing OEM BIOS setups such as dell or others. They will almost never have as many options or advanced settings for configuration. May wanna upgrade ur sys altogether if ur orginal drive is a 12GB. What ur sys is probably a PII 400 or like a PIII 450? anyways...GL! =0)

SAbot, from Windows.Net magazine:

"Another limitation is that Win2K limits the size of FAT32 volumes that you create with Win2K. Although Win98 and Win9x OSR 2.x can create FAT32 volumes as large as the theoretical maximum of 2TB (the practical maximum is 127.53GB), Win2K limits FAT32 volumes to 32GB or smaller. Although this limit isn't likely to affect the average user, hard disk capacities are increasing so quickly that this limitation could affect future users. (The average hard disk size on new workstations is 13GB to 20GB, so a 32GB volume isn't unrealistic.)" I have an A+ book that says the same thing.

I can't speak for your personal experience but this is a well known issue with W2K and FAT32 volumes. If you use a 9x bootdisk this limitation doesn't apply. Possibly this issue was fixed by M$ since, dunno (could Service Pack 2 have fixed this?).

you're right! good guess. i have a P3 500MHz.

unfortunately... the problem continues...

I made a windows ME and windows 98 boot disk. Then i deleted my 32GB (120GB) partition. That means i complete got rid of the drive from the comp's recognition. Then i tried using FDISK to get it back. Through primary dos parition, it comes to 8GB while extended dos parition allows the HDD to be 32GB. Seeing how it didn't work, i deleted the parition and tried with the windows ME disk.... no luck

Just to let u know, i think my 12 gig is NTSF. If i wanted to try to parition my new hdd in that format, how would i go about doing that. Using the boot disk, i usually type in fdisk and then partition it from there. It never shows any info on FAT32 nor NTSF.

Also sabot, what is exactly is EZ Bios (where do i get it, what does it do, etc)?

Thank you for your help and time
-Amit

hey man, if you have one hard drive in ntfs, and you are going through all the trouble of deleting partitions, why not just go ahead and delete the fat32 partitions and remake them in ntfs??? i have tried both fat32 and ntfs and i have found no differences besides the fact that you can compress NTFS partions in both win2k and winxp, so why all the fussing with fat32 when you could just change it to ntfs and it should work

well...

that's the problem. In my last response, i said,

"If i wanted to try to parition my new hdd in that format, how would i go about doing that. Using the boot disk, i usually type in fdisk and then partition it from there. It never shows any info on FAT32 nor NTSF."

Meaning, i donno how to delete the FAT32 partition and set it up as NTSF.

You can't create NTFS partitions with a DOS bootdisk. Since you already have a 12gig drive with the operating system on it (W2k, right?), why not format the 120gig from the Disk Management Console within Windows? Right click My Computer, select Manage, select Disk Management, right click on the 120 gig drive field, select partition, Extended partition, create your logical drive, then go back after the partitioning is done and right click on the thing again and select format and choose NTFS. (Be sure you select to partition/format the RIGHT drive).

Hmmmm . . . You've upgraded the BIOS and still hit the 32GB barrier, you've tried using fdisk and still hit the 32GB barrier . . . A PIII 500 isn't that old of a comp that I'd expect the BIOS to be stuck on 32GB even after the latest BIOS upgrade (especially with a Dell)! But on the other hand you shouldn't have been hit with the 32GB barrier using the bootdisk either if it was 2K Pro causing the barrier.

Well, no harm trying to format it in NTFS as desribed above and see what happens (it's a better file system anyway). If that doesn't work you may have to take Sabot's suggestion and try the overlay software. You can get it from the website of whomever made the harddrive. If your harddrive came in a retail box it probably already has it on a floppy disk. I'd try NTFS first just because drive overlays can cause headaches later on.

Please report back, I'd like to know what solution works and what the problem actually turned out to be.

BTW, it's not a very good idea to have only one partition/logical drive at a whopping 120gigs. You really should partition that into at least 3 partitions/logical drives. The drive access will be slower with only one partition as files get fragmented over such a large area, especially with a slower computer (relatively speaking).

On a sidenote, some hard drives actually have a jumper on the back that limits volumes to 32GB. I seriously doubt that your 120gig has this but you might want to take a peek back there just to make sure, it's normally something you see on drives that come with Compaqs. Also when you go to partition the drive from Disk Management, be sure to delete the existing partitions if any first (make sure it's wiped completely clean and showing up as all free or unallocated space) and select to allocate entire drive space to the new logical drive.

There is no jumper on the back that limits the HDD, only a jumper that determines whether it is a slave or master. I tried the method of formatting the 120gig hdd from disk management, but no luck. it still detects it as a 32gig.

so... i've updated my bios, used win2k format, and tried fdisk... still no luck. Will partition magic make a difference?

Also, another thing. The hdd came with a 3.5 in floppy disk and cd. However, when i boot my comp with the disk and cd in, the comp reads from the disk, then tries to read from the cd-rom. however, it isn't able to detect the cd-rom and brings up a screen with an error. Maybe the hdd is defective...

What does the floppy say on it? also the cd-rom? and what brand of hard drive is it?

I think it's unlikely the hard drive is defective. It looks like you have three choices now. The first is to call Dell tech support and see if they can tell you if that BIOS version has a 32GB limit. The 2nd, which may follow from the first, is to try the overlay software. I can't say much about your problem with the floppy and cd-rom without knowing what they are.

The 3rd option is the one I'd do personally and that's to partition the drive into 4 32GB partitions. You're going through an awful lot of trouble to avoid this, which is the recommended method anyway given the size of your drive. There's no disadvantage to having 4 partitions and there's actually a performance advantage.

This is how I'd personally set this system up.

Partition 1: 32GB; I'd take the OS off your 12gig because it's probably a 5400 rpm drive and set the 120gig as master. Your new drive will be 7200rpm and your OS will run faster off that drive. I'd put the OS on this 32GB partition. You can install your programs on this partition as well.

Partition 2: 32GB; DATA partition. For mp3's, etc.

Partition 3: 32GB; 2nd DATA partition.

Partition 4: 32GB; games, misc programs partition.

I'd use the 12gig as a ghost image dump for the 1st partition with the OS and programs on it (so long as this partition doesn't have more than 12GB of data on it). This can be very handy in the future if something goes wrong with your operating system, you can just restore it from the ghost image on the 12gig drive without having to reformat/reinstall everything.

BTW, I own a Dell with the same BIOS version. I had to upgrade from A04 to A11 a long time ago to enable SP2 compliant DIMMS for a memory upgrade. Can't say about the hard drive limits though because I've always partitioned drives with smaller that 32GB partitions, for data management and performance reasons.

I need to pass on a warning I found about doing that...partitioning a big HD into smaller partitions that the computer can recognize. This article said that doing that is bad because the BIOS doesn't know how to "do the math" to access all the drive even tho partitioning it (into 32GB partitions) appears to work at first. It said that eventually it could lead to data loss or corruption. I'm really sorry but I can't find the article otherwise I'd link to it. I don't know if this is true it's just what I came across while getting my HD going. The overlay option would get by this but in my opinion you should get an IDE Controller Card. It will solve your problem. If I find the article I'll post a link. Notes to help you find it...it's called "the awful truth" or "the sad truth" or something like that "the awful truth about hard drive partitioning" or "the awful truth about large hard drives" along those lines. Please post if you find it.

A controller card's not a bad idea, didn't think of that. ATA100 Promise controller cards are very cheap on Ebay, just got one there to replace a gimpy connector on an MSI motherboard, it was about $18 shipped. That's a lot better option I agree than using overlay software.

I DID IT! I was able to get 115GB of the 120.... but i don't mind :)

Well, first, i would like to thank you guys for your advice. Last night, i didn't know what to di, so i decided to call the maxtor company. I explained to them the situation (that i already upgraded bios, etc). They then said that i should take out the jumper on the back. I did so, and bam, i have 115 gigs. THey said that if that didn't work, i would have to
1. return the hdd
or
2. buy a maxtor adaptor card to fix it.

And well, i didn't have to go through those options since it worked. Now that i'm psyched with 115 gigs... i think i'll make the 120 gig as the master (7200 RPM).

So there WAS a 32GB jumper on the back, or are you referring to the master/slave jumper? Was there a particular position with the master/slave jumper that limited the drive to 32 gigs? Please exlplain, I'd like to know.

The 115 gigs you see instead of 120 is the result of the different ways hard drive capacity is calculated--in short, you didn't lose 5 gigabytes, 115 is what it's supposed to read. Normal.

Found this on Maxtor's website, I put it here for archival purposes in case someone else has this problem (moral of the story, it pays to read the manual for jumper settings):

Why does my system only recognize 32 GB?

Description
I have a drive that is larger than 32GB, but my system only recognizes 32GB?

Answer
If the operating system, BIOS, or MaxBlast can only recognize 32 GB of the drive it may be caused by one of the following:

Drive Jumpers: On drives that are larger than 32 GB there is a Capacity Limitation Jumper or the Alternate Capacity (AC) Jumper setting. This jumper will limit the capacity of the drive to 32 GB and should only be used when the BIOS hangs when trying to auto-detect the drive. Make sure that this jumper is NOT on.
The capacity limitation jumper is outlined in dashes on the Maxtor jumper settings page.

BIOS: On older systems (pre- November 1998) the BIOS may not support drives that are larger than 32 GB. In the BIOS setup please set the drive type to AUTO detect. If the BIOS detects the full capacity of the drive then the BIOS will support the capacity of the drive.

Operating System: Windows XP and 2000 have a 32 GB format limitation for FAT 32. That means if you formatted the drive in FAT 32 with Windows XP and 2000, the largest partition supported is 32 GB. You will need to format the drive in NTFS if you want to partition the drive larger than 32 GB.

So there it is. Took me 2 minutes to find after brand of hard drive was revealed.

How'd you/he get 115 out of 120 & I got 111? Mine is WD his is Maxtor...should this matter? Oh Win2000? Are you using NTFS?