Under Reporting Hard Drive Size

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Guest

I have a two hard drive system. One is a 12.7 Gigabyte capacity, and the
other one is and 80 gigabyte capacity. When I had Windows 98 SE, the software
put a dynamic drive overlay in the boot program. I upgraded to XP Home and
stayed with the FAT 32 file system. Now the computer is reporting the
capacity of the 80 gigabyte hard drive as 31.4 gigabyte. I have tried every
suggestion that I could find, to no avail. The 80 gigabyte hard drive is the
slave in the system, because I want to primarily use it for storage. Help! I
do not want to change the file system and have to reinstall the XP Home OS.

Ugly Trick
 
I forgot to ask, when you use Windows Disk Management option, what do it
show the drive size as?

JS
 
Usually with a drive overlay, it misreports the size on purpose so Windows &
older BIOS can see it.
When you say 'the computer' is reporting the size as 31.4GB, is that in BIOS
or in Windows?
You should be able to run the disk overlay software again to remove it.
Since it is a data drive and not the drive XP is installed on, removing the
overlay should not affect the installation.
Check the HDD manufacturer's site for the overlay software.
 
I have a new Abit motherboard with 3 Giga Hertz speed and 1 Gigabyte of RAM.
It worked fine with the Windows 98 SE and just the XP Home upgrade with SP2.
Then I installed the full XP Home operating System with SP2. It worked fine.
Then my 8 year old motherboard failed. I installed the new one, and I have
not been able to get it to report correctly since. In the BIOS, it shows 2.1
Gigabytes. I have the manufacturers software. I have used that software and
followed the instructions to make the change, but the Bios refuses to make
the changes. It needs to show just over 15 Gigabytes in the BIOS to make it
report correctly in Windows.

Ugly Trick
 
Ugly said:
I have a two hard drive system. One is a 12.7 Gigabyte capacity, and the
other one is and 80 gigabyte capacity. When I had Windows 98 SE, the software
put a dynamic drive overlay in the boot program. I upgraded to XP Home and
stayed with the FAT 32 file system. Now the computer is reporting the
capacity of the 80 gigabyte hard drive as 31.4 gigabyte. I have tried every
suggestion that I could find, to no avail. The 80 gigabyte hard drive is the
slave in the system, because I want to primarily use it for storage. Help! I
do not want to change the file system and have to reinstall the XP Home OS.

Ugly Trick
Click to expand...

Off the top of my head I would say you formatted the drive
as FAT32. WindowsXP natively can only format FAT32 up to
32GB. If you format as NTFS you should get the full size.

If you really need to use the drive as FAT32, then there are
a couple of Freeware programs that format FAT32 larger than
32GB under WindowsXP.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt
to respond to an unreasonable demand."

http://blog.tlerma.com/

A Windows professional's view of entering the World of Linux
 
I think that it defies a solution. I have tried all solutions. It
steadfastly shows 2.1 Gigaytes in the CMOS and 31.4 in Windows. Thanks for
your suggestion.
 
I have not data on the drive. I am trying to get it set up so that I can use
it. I used it when I had the Windows 98 Operating System. There was an
Overlay on then, and it reported the full 80 Gigabytes.
 
Thanks a lot to you C.Joseph Drayton.

C.Joseph Drayton said:
Off the top of my head I would say you formatted the drive
as FAT32. WindowsXP natively can only format FAT32 up to
32GB. If you format as NTFS you should get the full size.

If you really need to use the drive as FAT32, then there are
a couple of Freeware programs that format FAT32 larger than
32GB under WindowsXP.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt
to respond to an unreasonable demand."

http://blog.tlerma.com/

A Windows professional's view of entering the World of Linux
Click to expand...
 
Ugly Trick said:
I have not data on the drive. I am trying to get it set up so that I can
use
it. I used it when I had the Windows 98 Operating System. There was an
Overlay on then, and it reported the full 80 Gigabytes.
Click to expand...


UT:
It's hard to imagine why you would be using a 12.7 GB HDD as your XP boot
drive, but we'll let that one go...

Since you've indicated that there's no data on that 80 GB HDD and apparently
want to use it only for storage purposes, why don't you simply use your XP
Disk Management utility (Start > right-click My Computer > Manage > Computer
Management > Disk Management) and delete the partition(s) on that disk, then
create & format whatever partitions you wish and be done with it. It is true
that the formatting process will result in NTFS (and not FAT32) partitions.
If you can't live with that for some reason and need to create one or more
partitions > 32 GB (the max. XP will allow to be formatted FAT32), then
simply use your Win98 Startup floppy disk or whatever DOS floppy disk that
you have and format that 80 GB HDD FAT32.

If you go that route, the only problem you *may* run into is that DDO
program that had been previously installed on that 80 GB HDD. Those overlay
programs can be the source of miserable problems in the future even when the
disk is subsequently partitioned & formatted. Hopefully you won't run into
those problems. If need be you can use a simple program like zap.com (see
http://www.tburke.net/info/utils/) to purge the disk prior to the
partitioning/formatting process.
Anna
 
Hello Anna and anybody else that might read this. The problem is solved. The
drive was double shunted. I disconnected the boot drive and took off the
slave shunt. The BIOS read the full size immediately. That left a cable
select shunt on the 80 Gigabyte. I changed the shunt on the boot drive to
cable select. Problem solved.
Thanks everybody.

Ugly Trick
 
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