Backup Q external drive w/USB2 shows drive 2G not 40G

running win XP or ME, the 40G drive finally shows up in explorer, but
reports the wrong size

searched but cant find out the fix, is this a common problem??

thanks in advance

 

was probably partitioned and formatted with FAT16 rather than FAT32 or NTFS.
Try removing the existing partition using disk management, and recreate an
NTFS partition instead, then format it.

 

.....or another possibility is that the BIOS on some older PC's often cannot
handle newer, larger drives, though the smallest limit I had so far come
across was 20Gb. If, and I mean IF, this is the problem, one solution would
be to split the disk into a number of 2 Gb partitions, a second would be to
'flash' your BIOS with a BIOS upgrade from the manufacturer.

PS, ........re: Thor's comments, if the drive is formatted NTFS, forgetting
for a moment the size issue, this will be fine in XP, but will not be
recognised as a valid drive in ME (which relies on FAT32 - I think).

Cheers

L;ozT ..............completely!

 

To my recollection, BIOSes haven't had a 2GB limit since the early
Win95-era, and he couldn't be running XP on a system old enough to have such
a limitation.

Yes, good point. Furthermore, using XP's disk management tools will limit a
FAT32 partition size to 32GB.