hard drive showing wrong size

aakayb

i bought a custom built pc, without any OS system installed.

I've eventually managed to put windows 98 on there and properly installed the motherboard and graphics card using the discs provided.

But the hard drive is showing up as 2gb, when its suppose to be 160 gb. any ideas whats going on and how to fix it?

Joe_Bloggs

It might be an idea to browse the disk manufacturers web site as to how they get round the limitations of operating systems and motherboards being able to access the full capacity of their disks.
Also check the jumpers on the back of the disk. Some had in the past a 'clipping feature' which made them acts as a smaller disk.
The biggest file on a win98 system may be 2Gb but the biggest disk partition should be much larger. Having larger cluster sizes may be of use if the ones you have are very small.
Research the use of Fdisk to partition a drive so that you don't have to dedicate it all to one operating system.

J_B (Win98 is showing its age)

StrikeEagle

Format the drive as Fat32 or NTFS

Joe_Bloggs

A FAT32 filesystem is essential if it was not allready formatted as such. As far as I know NTFS is not an option with win98 but only with WinNT, Win2K and WinXP. The latter two are worth the money if you can get an OEM deal.
J_B.

StrikeEagle

ye true. Dont do NTFS if ur gonna use win98.

I got a feeling aakayb formatted the drive as FAT, which has max size 2 gigs i believe.

aakayb

so if i upgrade to windows 2000 or xp, i just need to re-format? how do you format the hard disk and format it to a NTFS system?

gary38uk

if you upgrade to xp, u can just boot with the xp disc and it will do it.
your problem with hard drive size was/is a common problem with older motherboards, a bios up grade usally cures this, as when the board was made discs were not that large, so it does not know what it is.
but you say the machine is new? so this should not be the case.

Godders

Wasn't there a conversion utility included in Win98 to convert FAT to FAT32? (Drive convertor?) Then with something like partition magic you can expand the partition to fill the whole disk.

englebert_2

If you go o the microsoft site you will find it is a known fault with windows 9, and a hangover from 95. I have the same problem.if you go to Explorer, right click on your disk drive and look at the properties yu should see the correct disk size. ;D