maxtor hdd

[wolfeee]

i just installed a maxtor 80 gig hdd, i wanted to use this as my primary but when pc boots up bios records it as an 80 gig, but when i go into my computer it recognizes as a 2 gig, and wont let me load my windows saying not enough space, can any one help

What version of Windows are you using?

[wolfeee]

did install win98 se and then i put it as slave to my win xp professional all with the same results bios=80
on my computer=2 gig

[paul9]

when you ran fdisk, on the fresh drive, did you enable support for large partitions, i.e. fat 32? have you partitioned the disk and left 78gig unpartitioned?

[Bovon]

Sounds like it has been fdisked and setup with FAT...not FAT32. FAT(16) only recognises 2 gb I think.

[dr_roberts49]

All Maxtor disks come with a utility called Speedmax. Use this utility to prep your drive. As paul9 and Bovon said, it looks like you fdisked it wrong.

Robert

[DoctorReno]

Also if you are using the Fdisk that is on, say, a 98SE bootdisk to partition it has a limitation in the 60 something GB. You can get the newer Fdisk that gets around the limitation at Bootdisk.com.

Bovon and paul9 are correct about FAT16 having the 2GB limit. You need to be sure to select large disk support.... and get the new Fdisk. If you can't find it let me know and I can email it to you.

dr_roberts49, Is Speedmax Maxtors version of a disk overlay or just their utility to det their drives up?

[dr_roberts49]

It's basically a replacement for fdisk. They recently went to bootable CDs, but you can also make a boot floppy. The SpeedMax files are also available on their website. Depending on your OS, they pretty much make your new Maxtor drive ready for installation. For the past 6 years, I've only used Maxtor drives, but I think each hard drive vendor has their own utility to prep the drives.

I also have a prep disk I got from Microsoft years ago, that sets up a hard drive for Windows 98 and 98SE. It has fdisk, and allows partitions up to 60GB in FAT32. It also creates a autoexec.bat and config.sys file for the MSCDEX.exe file and assigns a drive letter for the CDROM. None of which is necessary anymore, but might come in handy on older systems.

Robert

PS

I might add, that I recently purchased an 80GB Maxtor for my computer, and I couldn't get the Maxtor utility to work from the CD. I kept getting a Microsoft error message/send report to Microsoft prompt. Since it was a primary slave, I was able to prep & format it from XP's disk management.