Hard drive problems!

[gambler2611]

I just got a kick ass hard drive from a computer fair but whenever i try to f-disk it only showed 1/2 the space on the drive, so i updated f-disk and now it only shows a 10th of what is really on there! I really only want 2 particians of the drive and i cant really be bothered to have 3 or even 4 at the moment.

(specs is its any help)

120gb hard drive
8mb cache
7200 rpm speed
Udma 133

[DoctorReno]

Brand of HD? What OS do you intend on installing on this drive? How old is the MoBo on the system you intend to install this drive in?

[shahani]

What's a patrician?

Sounds like a Western Digital or a Maxtor drive. Why not use the floppy/CD that came with the drive?

If you don't have it try downloading the utility from the manufacturer's website.

You will never see the full space if you used the 98SE or ME fdisk.

[SeanC]

If you use Windows 2000 or XP you would see the full capacity of the drive. But since you're using FDISK I'm assuming you have 98 or ME so unfortunately there's no much you can do. Drive overlay software can only do so much.

Sean

[gambler2611]

Its an IBM Hitachi drive and im planning to install win 98 se on it. Thing is it doesnt matter whether i install the old or the new Fdisk on my pc it still messes up and it begins to really annoy you after re-booting ur pc for the 34th time.
Does anyone have any suggestions about whats wrong with it?

Does anybody have any ideas that dont involve buying a new OS?

Thanks a bunch

Andy

[gambler2611]

btw it came with no floppy or cd so im assuming that it doesnt need any specialist drivers or that there are known issues.

[Atomic Rooster]

What are your system specs? Mainly what motherboard are you using and is the BIOS up to date?

[gambler2611]

motherboard is the P4s8x-x which i bought about 2 months ago, it seems like a pretty good board and i dont see any reason that it doesnt work. I read on the microsoft site something about the fdisk update using 48 bit (wierd) code instead of the standard 16 bit used before.

(sys specs)

2533 mhz P4 533 fsb
512 DDR 333 mem
one 10 gb ATA 100deskstar IBM/HITACHI hard drive
one 123 gb UDMA 133deskstar IBM/HITACHI hard drive
geforce FX 5600 td-256 graphics card
16x DVD reader

I think thats all i can give you (for now) but it seems to have no probs reading the previous hard drive so im ASSUMING that its a short sighted code from microsoft (earlier).

I read something about the files on the update not properly transferring so i might try running it with winrar or winzip later which wont put the driver itself up but will put the fdisk version on the floppy up a notch (hopefully).

Thanks a bunch

Andy

[Atomic Rooster]

Have a read through this Installation Guide from Hitachi.

[T-32]

the hard drive bios and your computer bios are probably in conflict.. I don't know the exact fix, but try different combos in your bios,, especially LBA logical block addressing... I may be wrong but sounds like you don't have alot to loose.... good luck T-32