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FAT32

Posted by eternaldisciple [send private reply] at July 21, 2001, 05:52:27 PM

I have a system with a 20gb Ultra-DMA/ ATA 100 IDE Hard Drive. I
noticed that when installing, and under my computer, it registers the
total disk space as only 1.99GB. I ran FDISK in DOS which says that
partition 1 contains only 2047MB but that the total disk space is
19469MB. I installed PC DOS 7 before installing Windows 98 and did not
create seperate partition for DOS. After running Drive Converter and converting to FAT32, I still only registered the 2gb drive. Could I format the drive, and reinstall Windows on the new 32 bit FAT, or is there a way for me to resize the partition to take advantage of all the available drive space?

Posted by CHollman82 [send private reply] at July 21, 2001, 09:39:16 PM

The drive you bought should have come with an installation disk. The one that came with my WD Caviar (20gb Ultra ATA-100) created 10 2gb partitions, apparently this was the only way I could use the entire disk. The only advice I have for you if you dont have an install disk is to update your bios and hope that it will support drives larger than 2gb.

Posted by AngelOD [send private reply] at July 22, 2001, 12:20:00 PM

Actually, judging from your post, eternaldisciple, it tells me that DOS can see the entire drive, which means that there's no problem there.. If this is the case, then all you need to do is to remove all partitions and use a version of FDisk that supports FAT32. Then create the partitions you want, using up all diskspace (please remember to create more than one partition ;)

Then reboot, format all the partitions, and reinstall Win98.. (Btw, you need a Win98 bootdisk for this, but I guess you already figured *that* one out)

Anyway, hope this helps. :)

Posted by drdevil [send private reply] at July 23, 2001, 04:14:44 PM

It doesnt matter nowadays if the BIOS supports the disk size, except for booting. (bootloader must be in section it can read, (the one the bootsect loads)).

Most 32bit OSes read the drive themselves without using the bios.
But they guy that said use a version of fdisk that supports fat32 is correct, delete your old partition, create 20gig one and format it. then install win9x

Cheers
Gaz

Posted by grandsnafu [send private reply] at July 23, 2001, 04:24:59 PM

Don't forget to keep a partition open for linux, though! :-)

Posted by eternaldisciple [send private reply] at July 23, 2001, 05:55:59 PM

Ya, that's what I did drdevil. It took some messing around with though, because I couldn't just delete the primary partition. But after tricking FDISK I got it working at 4 in the morning. So thanx everyone.

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