40g drive only recognized 5.7

I've seen this type of question here before, but I'm really stumped. I have
a 40g samsung drive and I can't get my pc to recognize the whole 40g, just
5.78g. I have deleted the partitions and formatted and reformatted, but
nothing works for me. I thought you didn't need any partitions if you run
98se anyway. Is something wrong with my drive? Something obvious that I'm
forgetting? Put a new board in and everything is a-ok except the hd.
thanks for any insight.

 

Look at www.computerhope.com and also go to the website of your drive mfrs
and download the drive instal software. Also stop 'thinling'

 

You need at least one partition to run DOS, 95, 98, SE, ME, NT3.x, NT4.x,
Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Longhorn, Linux (any
flavor), Unix, MacOS, and so forth.

 

Is the BIOS recognising it as a 40gig drive or not? What size does fdisk
read drive as? If it is the former then you will have to check the BIOS
settings for your hard drive and make sure Win98SE is updated fully too.
If it is the latter then you need to understand fdisk and partitions.
All drives have one partition i.e. c drive then some people have more
than one i.e. c and d or c,d,e,f.

Also you didn't mention how old the machine is and what make the
motherboard is.

Stuart

 

Weird.

 

You haven't mentioned what motherboard/CPU combo you are installing this
into. Are you using FAT32 or FAT16?

 

Also, when the motherboard auto-detects the hard drive, what capacity
does it list for the drive? Does it tell you the number of heads,
cylinders, and sectors per track? From that, you can tell if the BIOS
is even recognizing the entire 40 Gb.

Scott Gardner

 

For old PC, such as old kind of Pentium board, 20G only detected as 2GB.

 

This is true. However, there should be no reason for a board to detect a
drive as 5.7 GB. There is no 5.7GB limit with a BIOS (usually has limited
at 2GB, 8.4GB, and 137GB), or software (FAT16 can only handle 4x2GB
partitions), but not 5.7GB

 

30 gig is a tough one. If you put in a 30 or higher your pc, assuming it
has a bios limit, usually does not see it at all, or perhaps, just cant
tell what it is and gives you that really odd 5.7 or whatever

 

Good point. If the BIOS doesn`t see it all then Windows will never see it in
a million years.

A computer is like an upsidedown triangle. Everything is ballencing and
comes through the BIOS which is at the bottom. If it carn`t see it then
Windows will never.

 

What if the number of cylinders is set wrong and not on auto. Then it might
be reconised as a 5.7gig