Hi, i hope someone can help me. I have a Seagate 80gb hdd. ive had it a while and had been using it in my old pc which was running win98. but to get the full 80gb capacity i had to install a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). This worked fine but now i have a new pc running win xp pro and want to move the hdd in to that pc ad additional storage. The problem is that the hdd only shows up as 31.5gb, i have tried so many things such as formatting, discwizard software from seagate (Windows and Dos Version). It seems to give back the 70gb temporarily but upon restarting the pc it comes back up as 31.5gb and cant get it to stay as 80gb. I have run out of ideas, if anyone knows how to sort this problem please let me know. Any replies are much appreciated. Thanks
check the jumper settings on the hard drive.. most drives these days have a setting to limit the capacity to 30Gig so you may have accidentally done that if you had to change the settings
i already checked that, it definitly wasnt on the 'Limit to 32 gb' jumper setting. Is there anything else i should check?
I'm assuming you are using an IDE Drive? If you ever upgrade your motherboard, go for SATA drive. They are a little more expensive, but you do not have any jumpers to worry about. Connect it to the motherbard, power it up, format it, and you are ready to go.
raceman, if u havent got nething relevent to the question why the hell are u aswering other than to bost ur post count.
Using the disk wizard, try a low level format. Anytime I have taken one drive from one OS to install another, I usually scrub the drive using Drive Scrubber which erases the entire disk, boot record and all.
Thanks for your replies guys, i have tried to format it using both FAT32 and NTFS, but i get the same problem, 31.5gb. I will try the Drive Scrubber option and let you know how i get on. hope this works. Thanks
I tried disc scrubber, it read the whole 76gb of the hard disk and erased all the data off it. I then proceeded to install windows xp pro and that also read the full capacity of the drive and completed the install. I noticed that if i restarted the pc it would still read the full drive but if i switched off it went back to only reading 31.5gb. So when i switched the pc back on it came up with the message 'disk read error press ctrl + alt + del to restart'. now im guessing this is because it went back to reading only 31.5gb again and in the process somehow affected the installation of windows on the hdd. any other ideas guys?
Do you have the latest BIOS update for your motherboard? I am wondering if that may be an issue. If not, I'd suggest you sending the drive back for a replacement.
i do have the latest bios update which should allow it to read the full capacity because i already have an 80gb, 120gb and 200gb hdds connected to this pc. I just wanted to format this one so i could use it in another pc but doesnt seem to work. I would return the hdd but i bought it about 6 years ago and the warranty would have expires by now
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm Good description there on hard drive size barriers. 31.5 gigs is shown as having 2 possible causes An old version of the Award BIOS did not properly handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. A BIOS upgrade would be require Windows XP setup cannot format a FAT32 drive larger than 31.5g during setup. Afterwards it can be done but not by the windows installation program. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q314463& I have also seen problems caused by those disk overlay programs where they write to the hard drive boot record which is not overwritten by a format. Boot with a floppy that has fdisk on it and type fdisk /mbr That is an undocumented switch in fdisk to clear the master boot record. That's also how you get rid of the Linux Loader LILO or Grub, or NT's boot loader.
I originally pulled the hdd out of my win98 system to install in to a system using amd athlon 1800+. so i tried it in that and it did not work, thats why i tried it in this system (my main pc) but still with no luck.
