Only have 2.1 gig showing on 6gig drive
 

I hope this makes sense, I'm not great at typing/verbalizing problems, but
here goes nothing.



I bought three used older 266 MHz p2 laptops a while back, one terca 8000 &
two versa lx. One versa (which I've already resold) had a four gig hd.



I've also sold the terca8000, but before selling, I pulled out the hd and
noticed it was actually a 8GB Toshiba Hard Drive Pack in it, but hd property
showed it to be 2.1 gb, and under hd device property it lists
as"IBM-DTNA-22160. I fdisk with win98 boot disk and enable large hd support
but still end up with only 2.1 gig . So I sold it as is.



That last versa (which I'm keeping) is also running 98se, and only shows hd
to be 2.1 gig in property's same as the terca which is weird because when I
pulled it's (the versa's) hd out it is a 6 gig IBM drive pack. I ran a low
level format or some similar type program I found from IBM, but the program
identified the drive as a Toshiba 2.1 gig I ran it anyways but it couldn't
find a problem.



This seems too weird to be a coincidence, and I could use the missing 4gigs
of room on my versa, hoping someone has an explanation.



Could it be some type of third party software doing this? I even installed
win-xp on it to see if NT file format would restore the hd's 6gig potential.



I purchased these laptops from a guy who I think was teaching computer
courses, but I lost his number, plus I got them pretty cheap so I wouldn't
want to bother the guy with questions even if I could find it.

Re: Only have 2.1 gig showing on 6gig drive
 

"ProStart241" <noname2437@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:RpqdnRAb8YR_V03cRVn-hA@rogers.com:

> I hope this makes sense, I'm not great at typing/verbalizing problems,
> but here goes nothing.
>
>
>
> I bought three used older 266 MHz p2 laptops a while back, one terca
> 8000 & two versa lx. One versa (which I've already resold) had a four
> gig hd.
>
>
>
> I've also sold the terca8000, but before selling, I pulled out the hd
> and noticed it was actually a 8GB Toshiba Hard Drive Pack in it, but
> hd property showed it to be 2.1 gb, and under hd device property it
> lists as"IBM-DTNA-22160. I fdisk with win98 boot disk and enable
> large hd support but still end up with only 2.1 gig . So I sold it as
> is.
>
>
>
> That last versa (which I'm keeping) is also running 98se, and only
> shows hd to be 2.1 gig in property's same as the terca which is weird
> because when I pulled it's (the versa's) hd out it is a 6 gig IBM
> drive pack. I ran a low level format or some similar type program I
> found from IBM, but the program identified the drive as a Toshiba 2.1
> gig I ran it anyways but it couldn't find a problem.
>
>
>
> This seems too weird to be a coincidence, and I could use the missing
> 4gigs of room on my versa, hoping someone has an explanation.
>
>
>
> Could it be some type of third party software doing this? I even
> installed
> win-xp on it to see if NT file format would restore the hd's 6gig
> potential.
>
>
>
> I purchased these laptops from a guy who I think was teaching computer
> courses, but I lost his number, plus I got them pretty cheap so I
> wouldn't want to bother the guy with questions even if I could find
> it.
>
>
>

It's a BIOS limitation. Have a look here:
www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/bioslmt.html


There a three work arounds:
1) Get a BIOS upgrade.
2) Use a disk manager (probably downloadable at the disk's manufacturers
site.
3) Use another OS. When you would boot from a knoppix CD, you could use
its fdisk to add an extended partition, with a logical partition inside,
filling the 3.9 GB. Then format it with mkfs (help via mkfs -?).
Windows 9x will recognise the new partition (assuming its FAT32) _after_
it has booted. So don't put a firewall, a virusscanner or some other
stuff on it which loads _during_ boot. The extra partition will _not_ be
seen from dos.