Hi Stuart, Very good points. OP didn't bother to say exact CPU. I assumed that with 750MB it's at least a PIII and new enough to have a large-drive BIOS. Also asszumed [ther I go again] that since it's a Toshiba, not some Compaq crap, that it doesn't have "restore" and "mystery partition" stuff. As you say, overlay could be included in "restore" CDs. More power, Mr. Scott! M2Go

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I have the restore CD for ths laptop from Toshiba. I have restored a couple of times but only 32gig has partition has been created. Checked Toshiba site and there is a bios update available from a few days back. Restoring once again and then going to do a bios update and see what happens. I would be surprised if the bios had gotten overwritten by me installing Fedora 5 before or anything else I did afterwards. Before this i was working fine on this with disk partition sizing going above 32gig in windows xp Anyway retrying - thanks for the help and comments so far.

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http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

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Installing an operating system does not re-write the mboard bios. Most hard drives have a jumper position on them that can limit the size your bios sees to a lesser amount if a jumper is installed. In the case of your 60gb drive, if the jumper is installed, it will probably limit the size your bios can see to 32gb. Information about that is on the label on the hard drive, or find the jumper position descriptions on the manufacturer's web site for your model. You have not told us what model Toshiba you have or how old it is. If you have an older Toshiba and it has an Award bios, there are several bugs in the older Award bios code - if your bios date is before about mid 1999, the bugs will prevent hard drives larger than 32gb (in Windows, binary size) from being recognized properly - in some cases the bios will freeze the computer when it tries to recognize a hard drive larger than 32gb; in other cases all drives 32gb or larger will be seen as 32gb. If there are bios updates for your model of laptop that are newer than that, the bugs have probably been corrected in the code in the updates, and a drive larger than 32gb is likely to be recognized properly. In that case you can flash your bios to a newer version and a drive larger than 32gb will be recognized properly. However there are other bugs that effect the proper recognition of drives larger than 64gb (up to 128gb), if the bios update is not new enough. If there are no new enough bios updates, there are several other options - one is what StuartS suggested - install what is generically called "dynamic overlay" software, which is available free for your brand of drive only at your hard drive manufacturer's site, but it's not for everyone - you must be very alert as to how you use bootable floppies or CD's and how you install operating systems. Richard59 said: "If your windows is pre-SP1 and you are formatting in fat32 then XP will only make max partition 32gb. If you have a floppy drive then use a 98 or other 9x bootdisk with fdisk and format to partition and format the drive before installing the operating system" It doesn't matter whether your XP is pre SP1 or not in this case. It must be SP1 or later to support hard drives larger than 128gb (in Windows; 137gb manufacturer's size) but that does not apply in your case, and your bios, hardware on the mboard, must also be able to recognize drives larger than that. If your drive or partition is detected by Windows as being larger than 32gb, XP will not let you format any partition larger than 32gb as FAT32 - it will require you to use NTFS by default. However you can use other methods to format a partition larger than 32gb to FAT32, such as doing that in Win 98/98SE/ME, and XP can recognize it fine. However, if Win XP sees your drive as 32gb and no larger because you have a bios limitation or the limiting jumper has been installed on the drive, you are allowed to use FAT32, but if all Windows can see is 32gb, that's all you get.

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"I think its the configuration of cylinders/sectors. Size is being returned as 32Gig with 4111 cylinders, 255 heads??, 512 sectors per head, 63 sectors (I think). But I took the hard disk out and looked at label and it says 16 heads, 16383 cylinders with I think 63 sectors." When I setup a HDD, I usually use the software that comes from the manufacturer rather than Microsoft. All you had to do was plug your HDD model number into google: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k100/5k100.htm http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/011C5FF9EC034D6E86256EBB00516E7A/$file/T5K100_ig.pdf http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

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i have tried dft, giving it one final try. It too sees 33Gig odd. Laptop is Equium M50 Toshiba, less than 6 months old. Might have to return the hard disk if DFT dont fix it. :-(( Only wise thing i have done in all of this, is that I backed up all my personal data prior to trying out fedora.

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I'm not sure about the Toshiba bios but in cmos, is the drive ID set to AUTO? Is LBA enabled for the drive? If it's only showing 32 gig there then the problem must be in cmos. But I'd suggest, as mentioned already, get a 98 bootdisk and boot up with it. At the prompt type FDISK and enter, Y to large disk support and then option 4. Post back exactly what it says. When the computer was working properly, when booting did you get a message something like 'EZ bios loaded Press CTRL for boot options'. If so that would indicate you previously had a drive overlay installed which would have overcome a bios limitation. A better solution than using a bios overlay would be to check Toshiba's site for a bios upgrade. You could also try manually entering a cylinders/heads/sectors of 16383/16/63. That's for an 8 gig but is the maximum C/H/S that can be recognized. The firmware of most larger drives contains that info and will sometimes return the full drive capacity when queried by the bios. If you do that the bios will show 8 gig but FDISK may show the entire capacity.

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I suggest you fully write zeroes to the hard drive, then repartition and reformat the HDD using either a 98SE boot diskette (FAT32) or your XP disc (NTFS) then load Windows XP. That ought to do it. When Google isn't your best pal

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"Laptop is Equium M50 Toshiba, less than 6 months old." Okay - so it's new enough it should support any size of hard drive. Check that the hard drive does not have the size limitation jumper installed. You don't have to do anything special in the bios Setup. The position the drive is connected to in the bios Setup should be set to Auto, by the method Auto or LBA - all the positions can be set that way. You don't need to enter parameters - the bios will find them automatically. Linux or XP can't change the parameters of the hard drive - that info is provided by the drive itself. When you run Win XP Setup from it's CD, it should see the full size of the hard drive - have it wipe out the existing partition, make a new one of the size you want - a single partition, or whatever. If Windows still can't see the full size of the drive, your Linux installation may have altered something XP can't see. In that case, you can wipe out the existing partitions and any data on the drive using a zero fill utility or whatever utility Hitachi has that is similar. That will wipe out any partition and mbr changes Linux made. If you are making one partition or are making one larger than 32gig and you don't care whether it is FAT 32 or NTFS, you can make a NTFS one - partition and format the drive using the Win XP CD, at the beginning of Setup. If you want a partition larger than 32gig to be FAT32, use a Win 98 or 98SE Startup disk, run Fdisk to partition it, then Format to make format it FAT32. NOTE that if you use something other than XP to partition the drive, XP itself leaves a tiny amount of free space at the end of the drive - 8mb or a bit more - your partition(s) should not fill the drive. Then run your Win XP Setup from it's CD, installing it into the existing partition(s).

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"Linux or XP can't change the parameters of the hard drive - that info is provided by the drive itself." The hard drive has physical parameters that can't be changed. They are translated by the drive to the bios as xxxxxx sectors - when you use LBA translation you get the maximum number of sectors that can be seen. That number of sectors can be interpreted logically by the bios as one, or often one of more than one, combination of parameters that make it its total size - one of those combinations of parameters is what is listed on the hard drives label, and that is often the bios's first choice in a list of parameters. This situation in the bios does not change whatever operating system you are using, unless you are using UNIX, with which you are supposed to use detect by Auto, by the method Normal in the bios - UNIX will still see the full size of the drive. There is no point in using User settings in the bios to set the same parameters as on the drives label in the bios, because the bios is already doing that if you are using detect by Auto, by the method Auto or LBA. You may be able to use User settings in the bios and plug in lesser or different parameters, but you must adhere to certain rules, and not all combinations of them will work correctly. When your operating system sees your drive partition, it is using logical parameters for the size of the partition it sees - if it cannot see the whole size of the drive, it cannot see the true maximum partition size either, and the parameters it sees are proportional to the size it sees. If your installing Linux has interfered with what hard drive size XP can see, zero filling or otherwise wiping the drive will allow XP see, partition, and format the drive to it's true size again.

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I have the same and I used THREE PC's with deferent motherboards Intel D945**, D915*** and Gigabyte. The bios and Windows XP only sees 62GB approx as the absolute disk size of my 80GB HDD. ( My others HDD's are 160GB and 120GB and their OK ) I have a hard disk showing only 62GB as its size when it is actually 80GB. There are no hidden partitions, there is no free space which is not allocated, I have checked this with Windows Disk Management and Partition Magic and Easy Recovery Professional and NDD from Norton Systemworks 2006 and fdisk.

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