Trying to partition a 120GB Seagate drive but fdisk will only let me have ~48GB for the primary DOS partition. Bios sees the drive as a 120GB drive OK and I've partioned 80 and 60GB drives before with fdisk.

A faulty drive perhaps ?

At a guess the Drive is fine, the size of the disk is too big for fat32, win98

the bios cannot recognise this drive. Have you got the latest BIOS for your motherboard. CAUTION - UPGRADING BIOS HAS RISKS read the instructions CAREFULLY.

Originally posted by NUCAD
the bios cannot recognise this drive. Have you got the latest BIOS for your motherboard. CAUTION - UPGRADING BIOS HAS RISKS read the instructions CAREFULLY.

If you read the original post, you'd realise the problem is not with the BIOS, but with FDisk under Win 98.


GB:

IIRC Win 98 has strict limitations on the size of it's partitions (can't remember them off-hand though:().

Like I said http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044 :thumbsup:

Originally posted by Skatiechik
Like I said http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044 :thumbsup:

Skatiechik, - yur da man ! :thumbsup: :D

...and thanks to everyone else who took an interest.

Next of course I went to format, - and got 'formating 48,93.9MB' :o

But this (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263045) explains that.

Microsoft...don't you just love 'em ;)

Interesting... I thought FAT32 partitions were limited to a maxiumum of 32GB.

Certainly, if you attempt to format a large (40Gb+) hard disk within Windows XP, aren't you limited to NTFS only?

Greybeard - upgrade your Windows version, man :D

Try bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com/) for an up-to-date win98 startup disk.

Fat 32 (what Windows 98 uses) cannot partition disk larger than 130GB (effectively 120GB), BUT Fdisk has troubles seeing disks that are larger than 40GB.

My advice is to ignore the values Fdisk gives you and work yourself the size of each partition you want on your hard disk drive. If you just want the one, just let Fdisk do all of it, format it and you won't have a problem to recon with.

To be fair, IF you wish to have two partitions I wouldn't have a Windows partition larger than 20GB anyway, for the program files, Windows and random system files, the 100GB left for personal data.

Originally posted by Abdul


Greybeard - upgrade your Windows version, man :D

Nah ! ...old dog - new tricks - don't mix :D

I've an 80GB and a 60GB drive in the system I'm using so couldn't understand why I was getting the fdisk problem. Turns out I was using a very old Win98 boot disk.

I've now found the boot disk I downloaded from Bootdisk.com a couple of years ago, - the grey cell depletion is gaining ground ;)

The 120GB drive is for an external USB enclosure I'll need for back-up as I've three PCs to rebuiild/upgrade in the next week or so.

BTW on the re-writer issue I ended up buying this (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=10673805049&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=74092) - got it for £10.99 when I bought it. The attraction being it's shorter than most drives and will fit more easily into my new mini PC case [AOpen XC18] :cool: