New Drive Question

[booj]

Hi guys,

I installed a friends old Seagate 60 GB drive as slave on IDE1 last night, in order to back up my files before reformating and reinstalling windows on the primary drive. My current drive is an 80GB barracuda, running XP formatted as NTFS. I think my mates drive was formatted using FAT32.

When I installed the drive I could see the files on it straight away...on deleting all data on the drive its capacity was showing as 1.99GB!! I tried to reformat it from in XP, so now it is showing as NTFS, but the size is still the same. I have tried to add some files to the drive but it says the capacity is not big enough?

What am I doing wrong ? Any help much appreciated..

[Dax_Brandy]

does your friends's drive shown as 60G in his/her PC? what's your specs?

[booj]

Actually now I think about it, the drive may have been partitioned...but Im sure I could only see the one partition in FDISK...

[Bovon]

Not completely sure, but I don't believe fdisk can deal with a drive that has NTFS on it. You may have to use the manufacturers disk utility and zero out the whole drive, re-fdisk it to set it up like you want.

[HeadBand]

no in fdisk just go and delete non dos partitions then re partition it using fat32

[caddmannq]

What Headband said will usually work. But I've had drives that had special "boot managers" installed on them that fdisk couldn't "undo".

I had to do a low level format on those drives to get them completly clean.