IDE Hard disk - partition fragged

[dragonfire]

I am building a PC for a friend and running into to some problems. It is a freshly built machine and after putting it all together ran a Win2K Pro OS CD to install and all seemed to be ok until I rebooted to continue the install....

I got the error message NTLDR missing, hmm - tried booting from CD again and noticed that the 20G drive was only being reported as a 2G drive! Delved a little deeper using the windows recovery console and found a couple of partitions that I happily blew away, getting me up to about 8G! chkdsk reports unrecoverable errors on the drive and I'm at a loss now. The IDE drive came from a SCO box hence the silly partition map. I only have Win2K so fdisk is not available - how do I get around this and what do I do to perform a low level format/partition on the drive?

Cheers

[shahani]

Download a bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com. I'd go for the 98SE disk.

Use that to boot up, fdisk and format. Though if you have the 2000 CD you can boot from it and format is part of the set up routine.

No need to do low level format. You may actually damage the drive.

[Epyon9283]

Yeah just boot off the win2k cd and format it there. Fdisk isn't needed.

[dragonfire]

Yeah but thats the problem - when I format I cannot see most of the drive! Formatting doesn't see (now) more than 8 Gig of drive space and chkdsk reports unrecoverable errors. Even when I had completed the process when the disk was "2 Gig" in size NTLDR was reported as missing. Hence why I need something lower than "format" as that doesn't even allow manipulation of partitions.

[dragonfire]

All right - more information that serves to confuse the heck out of me. I downloaded off the Hitachi Storage website the toolset for this drive which included a low level formatter, MBR wiper, test and analysis suite and that saw the 20.58G no problems - I wiped the MBR, ran full diagnostics and thought that would sort it - but Windoze still sees a 1.98G hard drive.

I checked it out in the BIOS and that is reporting the disk as 2.1G! So things seem to be going wrong at an early stage. I have 2 machines plus the one I'm building for a friend - two of the three are on latest BIOS revs - an Asus board running AMD 1.2, and an Intel 865PERL.

Please any ideas where to go from here - I'm thinking it cannot be the drive firmware cos the low level formatter sees it fine, its not machine dependant (an old Thunderbird, AMD XP and a Pentium based board all only see a 2.1G drive) so where else can I look?

Thanks

[John Prophet]

Is there a little "clip" on the hard drive or a tiny jumper that limits it to 2.1g perhaps??

[VHockey86]

isnt 1.98GB the FAT16 partition limit?

[dragonfire]

John Prophet - you are a potential genius!

I have yet to try it but yes there is a jumper missing - the information on the back of the hard drive is not well laid out when you don't know what the information is telling you! (Duh!!!)

I'll confirm on this thread if thats fixed it but since the drive jumper is set on 2Gb Clip, slave right now...

Cheers

[dragonfire]

John Prophet - you are confirmed genius.

I'd never come across that "feature" before... Learn something new with every build :-)

Thanks for your help and suggestions all.

[sfw1960]

The newer drives have a 32GB clip jumper....
Go figger JP to the rescue , again....
BTW , John - anyone who pulls their hair out working on these IDIOT boxes all the time IS a genius , not "potential" ~heh ...