I have two 18g external drives attached to a QLogic SCSI adapter. The drives are seen at bootup by the adapters utility, they're seen by Device Manager who reports them to be working properly ... but they don't show up in Windows Explorer. Both have been low level formatted. If I try fdisk to partition them, even with large partition support enabled I can't get more than an 8g partition there and I want one large 18g drive. What am I missing here when it's so much easier in WinNT or Win2K? thanks, -- tim

The 8 gig limit is a bios limitation on older machines. The only way around it is to update your system's bios or install the hard drive manufacturers overlay software (which stinks).

Older machines? It's a new Presario. How do you even get into the BIOS settings in WinME? There's no option for F2 to take you into the settings.

The bios would have nothing to do with Windows. You would get into it before anything boots. Usually it is by hitting Del before Windows boots. Is the SCSI adapter old? It could be the bios on the card is to blame. Also, Me has a problem with older cards in general.

This sounds familiar. I have a new PIII 500 m. I installed a Quantum Fireball 20 GB hard drive in an external IDE box that I have connected to my parallel port. The drive is recognized and is assigned a drive letter in Windows. I envisaged using the HD as an external backup and storage device. However I am having two problems: 1. The Microsoft backup utility will only backup up to 2 GB. The OS is Windows ME so I don't understand why my computer will only recognize up to 2 GB. 2. I have also tried to use Drive Image and Paragon Drive Backup but they both want to run in DOS. When I start up the computer in DOS the external hard drive is recognized but it is not assigned a drive letter. As a result I can't backup using those utilities. Any ideas on what to do so I gain full use of the external hard drive?