Hard Drive shows 1.99 Gig only

[Guest]

I have an old Compaq Presario. The hard drive(s) only read 1.99 gig and they
are both 15 gig drives. I have tried fdisk and selected large drives, but it
still stays at 1.99. I also went to Compaq's home home page no new update for
the firmware. What can I do to get both drive to read correctly. Thanks for
the help, I have hit the brick wall an I am stuck to it.......

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have an old Compaq Presario. The hard drive(s) only read 1.99 gig and they
are both 15 gig drives. I have tried fdisk and selected large drives, but it
still stays at 1.99. I also went to Compaq's home home page no new update for
the firmware. What can I do to get both drive to read correctly. Thanks for
the help, I have hit the brick wall an I am stuck to it.......

Since there is no fdisk.exe under WinXP, your brick wall
may be that you've posted in the wrong newsgroup. Try
a Win9x newsgroup, then check your BIOS settings and
create some FAT32 partitions.

 

[Dave B.]

How old? it may only support a 2GB drive if it's really old. What size drive
did it original have in it?

 

[Richard Urban]

The drives are likely formatted as fat16 which has a (I believe) 2 gig
maximum size per partition. Format the drives as fat32 and you can use the
complete drive as one partition - if your operating system and motherboard
are also up to the capabilities.

This is one of the reason that the drive manufacturers supply their drive
overlay applications to set up the drive. It tricks the computer into
allowing large partitions. It also wrecks havoc with many Windows XP
systems.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

The drives are likely formatted as fat16 which has a (I believe) 2 gig
maximum size per partition. Format the drives as fat32 and you can use the
complete drive as one partition - if your operating system and motherboard
are also up to the capabilities.

Yes, FAT16 allows a max of 2 gigs. As an aside, a lot of digital cameras
use a FAT16 file system which limits them to 2 gig or smaller memory cards.

 

[alanglloyd]

I have an old Compaq Presario. The hard drive(s) only read 1.99 gig and they
are both 15 gig drives. I have tried fdisk and selected large drives, but it
still stays at 1.99. I also went to Compaq's home home page no new update for
the firmware. What can I do to get both drive to read correctly. Thanks for
the help, I have hit the brick wall an I am stuck to it......

I think you want a BIOS and/or HD driver update which provides LBA to
beat the 2Gb limit.

It must be an _incredibly_ old PC. But you should still be able to
partition it to have multiple logical partitions of 2Gb appearing on
separate drives with your present BIOS.

You might be able to do something with Partition Magic if you bought
it.

Alan Lloyd

 

[Dave B.]

It doesn't work that way, a 2GB limit means 2GB TOTAL drive size, it is a
drive limitation, not a partition limitation. Partition Magic would be of no
help overcoming this.

 

[Richard Urban]

No, it is partition size.

I used the trick for may years of having smaller partitions, that equaled
way more than the 2 gig spec. I ran a 20 gig drive with about 9 partitions
if I remember correctly. I was quad booting DOS, Windows 3.11, O/S2 and then
the original Windows 95 which were all fat16 operating systems. Each was on
it's own 2 gig partition on this 20 gig drive.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!