New Harddrive won't work

[Guest]

I just purchased a larger, 160 GB, second hardrive for
storage purposes. When I format the new drive using the
Windows format utility or even a third party like
parition magic 7.0, it only recognizes it as 31.4 GB.

I borrowed a friends 120 Gb harddrive and it only reads
1.2 GB

Any idea what may be causing this or how to fix it?

 

[nobody]

What does your bios say about the size?

 

[Guest]

how do I find out what my BIOS reads the size at?

-----Original Message-----
What does your bios say about the size?



.

 

[Guest]

I checked my BIOS and it only reads the new hardrive has
having 3000MB

 

[joust in jest]

Your computer's motherboard BIOS was built long before gargantuan hard
drives came along. It does not understand the drive geometry, so it takes a
wild stab at it.

Your drive should have come with a "Drive Overlay" utility that will "fool'
your BIOS into thinking it is a different drive. Be aware, however, that
drive overlay software will have to be removed (sometimes with catastrophic
loss of data) before you can use this drive in any other system.

steve

 

[nobody]

I've never heard of a 3 gig bios barrier but for more info just go to google
and search on "disk size barriers". If your bios cannot recognize the full
size of your disk then there is no operating system that will without using
some type of disk management software (not recommended).

 

[Gene-O]

Anon - when you do FDISK on the new HD are you sure its
seeing the new one and not the old one? Second, when it
asks you to select NTFS vs FAT32 are you selecting NTFS?
Finally, is there a partition on the new HD that its
seeing. Make sure you have both HD properly and separately
recognized - use the automatic HD recognition feature in
CMOS. Your new HD may be identified as drive D or E or F
and your format tool is formatting the wrong one! Just
make sure CMOS is working with correctly labeled hard
drives!