OK, so I got ths gateway 2000 pc at the flea market. It was previously a p133 but I had an old p200 chip lying around si I put that in. I had a caviar 600 meg hard drive ubt that died so I went to the pawn shop and got myself a couple of maxtor 2.5's for 6 bucks. I plugged them in, and they had to be set up in the bios, because they would not autodetect peoperly. They both were not formatted, but onw had an unformatted partition of 2.3gb. I deleted that, because Fdisk says it was not fully used, and tried to add a 2.5 gb partition. As soon as I deleted my 2.3 partition, my hard disks BOTH shrink down to 504 mb and get formatted as FAT16. I don't get the "would you like to enable large drive support?" dialog either. So, to sum it up: I've got 2 blank maxtor 2.5's that will only be recognised by Fdisk as 504 mb drives. I NEED to use a boot disk for this because I have no OS installed

Maybe the PC has an old BIOS which only recognises 500+MB HDD !! You are using a W98SE OEM boot disk ??

The HD is recognised properly in the BIOS, I had to type in the sectors and stuff manually. And yes, I am using a 98se boot disk. Maybe I'll go see If I can get some updates for my bios.

When it asks if you would like to enable large disk support choose yes. 2.5GB is a large drive to an older pc. If it is a pentium board that will take a 200Mhz cpu then it will probably be ok for the 2.5gb drives. I have fit up to a 4gig in Pentium gateway 2000's. Look for an auto setting in the bios i'm almost sure it's got one. You may have entered the wrong settings also, double check them. ASUS A7V8X Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17ghz 768MB DDR 2700 nVidia 128mb FX 5200 WD 80gb SE NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

Make sure you have the drive set for LBA in cmos. Also make sure there's not a cylinder limiting jumper set on the drive. That could limit it to 500 meg.