60gb showing as 49 - plus d drive AWOL

[TBH1]

Firstly, if this is on the wrong forum, let me apologise - - -not sure if this belongs here or the operating systems one - or am I on that and it belongs to the storage thingy ???

Owing to problems encountered with my PC, I decided to re-format last night and have had " funny " results. System ? Athlon 600mhz, 384 RAM, W98SE, 2 hard discs, a 60gb Hitachi/IBM master and a 40gb IBM slave. I attempted to restore my 60gb to a backup, taken on Saturday and stored on the slave. Got continuous errors re corrupted files so decided to format and reload w98se back - - - - . I formatted C drive, fdisked and restored system - - - only to find that my 60gb had changed to a 49gb'er, and no sign of me secondary 40gb D drive !!!! I know these drives sometimes do not reflect there size but this master defo registered as 60gb when my system was working - - - and even more importantly, the disappearance of my 40 gb one is disastrous - - -all my backups and system settings / accounts on this. On boot up, both drives are there, BIOS is set to autodetect - - - a utility I have been running lately ( due to other problems) picks up the fact that there are 2 drives there, with correct size . Anyone any ideas here ???

Oh, and if I'm in the wrong place - - I'll get me coat !!!

[TBH1]

woops - - -how did that get on twice ????

[sm8000]

What kind of motherboard do you have? Check your manufacturer's website for a newer BIOS, see if your issue is addressed.

Since your 60GB is a Hitachi/IBM, I'll assume it's not a "DeathStar" IBM but I could be wrong. Check the jumpering on the drives - try them both on cable select first, and then try one as a master and one as a slave. If there's nothing you need to keep on the 60GB drive, search for and download IBM's Zap utility, extract it to a boot floppy, and use it to 'zap' the drive, allowing you to start fresh. Make sure the 40GB is not in the system, so you don't zap it by accident!!! Once Windows is fully loaded on the 60GB drive, it won't show as 60GB but as 50 something, because of the way the math works out when you convert from decimal to binary.

[TBH1]

Gone through the whole thing again, fdisked C drive - while I was there switched to disk 2 and it was there. Checked BIOS settings - in there too.

The good news - - my C drive back to full size, there was a 'rogue' partition there, caused by me, obviously, yesterday when fdisking - - - don't know how though .

The bad news - - -yep, still no primary/secondery - - - -in device manager under hard drives it lists 2, both General IDE Disk Type47 ( whatever that means), under settings in the 1st it says :-
current drive letter assignment C - - - - - for the 2nd drive letter greyed out. By the way, when checking with fdisk, the partition for that drive was non DOS - - - scared to do owt with it as I didn't want to destroy anything there.

Jumpers are correct, cabling too - - - the system has worked with this configuration. Am baffled more than ever that BIOS detects this drive, also fdisk thingy - - - yet windows won't !!!

sm800 - - -grateful for your help mate.

[mbenit1]

You should change from auto to LBA in the Bios setup and then when you boot up look at how the drivers are recognized on the screen pause if you have to see.

[TBH1]

mbenit1 - - certainly have a go at this tonight, though almost all posts suggest setting to auto. Sorry about confusion with this thread being on twice.

[TBH1]

still working on this by the way - - - - motherboard is MicroStar 6167

[sm8000]

In fdisk, did you set your Active partition?

[TBH1]

info on fdisk
disk1
partition.....status.....type....vol label......mbytes...sys.. usage
C:1 ......... A ........Pri DOS ...ibm60gb ...58643 ...fat32 ..100%

disk2
partition.....status.....type....vol label......mbytes...sys.. usage
1 ......... A ........non DOS .......... ...39253 .......... ..100%

[sm8000]

Both your drives have active partitions. Only your boot drive needs to be. The second drive may have an active partition as long as it's not D: It also looks like your 40 is not formatted, unless it's NTFS. But don't do anything to it yet - first go to www.msi.com.tw and look up your board. See if there's a BIOS update available, it may fix your problem. I'm guessing now your problem is that your board has a limit on storage capacity.