A new extra internal hard drive reads in disk administrator as "8056 MB" but the drive is actually 40GB. a 120GB was installed previously with no problems (on another cable). we tried different drives and they all read as 8GB. can't figure out if this is an NT problem or maybe hardware? it's an IBM MPro and the drive is being attached to a ribbon cable which goes to the CD-ROM. the ne w drive is jumpered as master and everything is OK except it cannot be formatted to it's true size. any thoughts? thanks, Joe

And the bios reads it just fine? The 8gig view can be a couple of things. First boot up on a boot diskette containing fdisk or delpart. Delete all partitions on the new drive. Now go into disk administrator and lets see if it sees the whole drive.

wanderer, I checked in setup and it reads accurately as 40GB. BTW, this is happening with new drives with no previous formatting. now, what are the couple of things it could be? and thanks for responding - NT help is hard to come by these days. ~ Joe

that is to be expected with NT4. remember, it doesn't run on FAT32...

He said it wasn't formatted yet, so it can hardly be FAT32, can it..... See IBM DTTA-351010 10.1 GB Drive Capacity Is Inaccurate> - it refers to having the latest service pack installed for some large drives.

I did try formatting it - NTFS - but it still shows up as 9GB. this is not for the system, but an extra drive for media storage. the MS article is about the system drive, and anyway I do have the latest SP6a installed. I had originally tried to install a new 120GB drive, which also showed up in Disk admin as 9 GB. there is already another 120GB media drive which shows up as it should as 120GB. any other suggestions are welcome... Joe

You have a strange one here Joe. My next step after reappling the service pack [never hurts] would be to put the drive in a different NT4 machine. See if you can see the entire drive and if you can format it as 120 gig [not sure NT will see a 120gig if Windows2000 requires a patch to see 120gig but you have a drive in the system that's 120gig...]. But you sure should be able to get more than 8gig. That 8gig in disk admin was usually the result of no service pack. So either we have a hardware addressing issue or something is broken in NT.