[RESOLVED] New HDD Help

[Scott Graham]

My dad has an old HP P266 (I think is what it is). His old 6.4GB HDD crashed so he bought a new Seagate 10.2GB. I partitioned the HDD and it only gave me 8GB. I don't really care if thats all it gave me, but when I formated it, it only formated 2.1GB. Yes the bios shows it's an 8GB HDD also. I tried several differen't versions of format, one from a dos6.2 disk, and a win98disk. Any ideas?
My next question is, I have a disk that came with some of the micron pc's here at work. It is a cdrom boot disk, it uses a generic driver on the cdrom so you can install windows or whatever without getting the true drivers for the cdrom. Are there any free aftermarket programs that does the same thing? My micron disk isn't very consistent in finding the cdrom, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
Thanks for the help.

[ledrichard]

ok dude first things first. The bios detects an 8GB hdd correct? Then what you need to do is either update the bios or use a disk mananger. Your bios has the 8.0GB limitation. after you do either, you need to format the hdd using fat32 in order to be able to partition the hdd as one whole partition. You can only do this with as osr2 disk or newer. You can slo do this with the disk mananger SW that came with your drive. The thing is, If you have win95a then you will not be able to use fat32. You will need to partition the drive into 5 2GB partitions. you will have to disable the large disk support in order for you to do this. You will still need to update your bios and/or use a disk manager.

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hey its me again!

[skut]

my 20 gig seagate didnt come w/ the disk utils to i had to d/l it. what it did for me was partition and format the drive (fat 32) then install a stand alone OS. from there you let it boot, put in your boot floppy, press the spacebar(instructions on the screen after the stand alone OS was installed) and go to town installing your os.

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prompt$p$g [dos = elite]

[shawnMt]

WHen you run Fdisk to partition the drive, answer "yes" to the opening question.

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Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted

Paint your old laptop! (http://www.auwebdesign.com/shawnpages)

[Scott Graham]

I did answer yes to enable large disk support, the bios saw it as an 8 gig, and so did fdisk. My dad said he didn't care about the last 2 gigs because he plans on selling the PC. The HDD didn't come with any software so I'm gonna look for some online, thanks for the help.

[Scott Graham]

Ok...Are there utilities that allow me to format using FAT32 right off the back? If so where can I get a good free one? Or do I have to format it using then convert it to FAT32?

[Revenant]

On seagate's website, you can find their Disk manager software, Seagate DiscWizard. This will allow you to install the drive at full size. Also, it will allow you to format as FAT32. BUT! be sure you are installing 95b or 98. 95a will not work on FAT32. Also realize that in order to install the Disk Management software, it will have to erase your HDD.

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What's this button d--

[Revenant]

Seagate Disc Wizard can be downloaded here: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

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What's this button d--

[Scott Graham]

Kinda Ironic, I found that site last night and downloaded that utility. I will be installing win98, and the HDD is brand new, so there isn't any info on it yet. I will try to work on the drive either tonight or tomorrow thanks for the help.

[MAYHEM]

As for the CD-ROM driver question, I have a simple solution. All my boot disks for DOS and windows use this.

Make a bootable disk from the format options in Explorer, then copy the mscdex.exe file from the Windows/command directory, then copy a CD-ROM "sys" file from a CD-ROM driver disk (I use aoatapi.sys from the Aopen drives, haven't found a 4x or faster IDE drive it won't work with). Next, copy the standard utilities: copy, delete, deltree, edit, fdisk and format. Now reboot the computer using the boot disk. At the A:\>, type "edit config.sys" when the editor comes up, put in this line:

DEVICE=A:\AOATAPI.SYS /D:WHIZBANG

(You can use any thing in place of WHIZBANG, that is siply a nme for the device, just remember exactly what you named it)

Save that and exit, then at the A:\> type "edit autoexec.bat" When the editor comes up ad this line:

A:\mscdex.exe /D:WHIZBANG (or whatever you named the device)

Save and exit. Now reboot the machine with that disk, you have a CD-ROM ready to go. If you have more than one CD (CD and CDRW) it will find and load for both devices and give them seperate drive letters and show you what letter is assigned to each.

If you will send mew an e-mail I will send you the aoatapi.sys file, as I said it works with every 4x or faster IDE CD-ROM drive I have seen.
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There is no Spoon!

[This message has been edited by MAYHEM (edited August 31, 2000).]

[jhutto]

Originally posted by shawnMt:
WHen you run Fdisk to partition the drive, answer "yes" to the opening question.



umm.. That only helps with the 2gb per partition limit(i.e. FAT16). His limit is at 8gb(i.e. BIOS).

[Scott Graham]

Thanks for the help ya'll. It worked like a charm. And the issue with the CDROM, it was set as the Secondary Master, and it needed to be the Primary Slave for the disk to recognize it. Thanks again.
Scott

[shawnMt]

Originally posted by jhutto:
umm.. That only helps with the 2gb per partition limit(i.e. FAT16). His limit is at 8gb(i.e. BIOS).

Thanks for pointing that out jhutto but Scott stated he was fine with the drive being 8GB. He stated that after he partitioned/formatted the drive DOS was only seeing 2GB. I just threw that in as a suggestion.



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Computer Geek + Football Freak - man I have issues :)

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[cyberhh]

The problem is in the BIOS limitation. Some of the 1st gen Pentium 2's had an eight gig BIOS limitation. Download a BIOS upgrade and your problems will go away.

Please - this is the correct way to fix this problem - always try the right route before installing a drive translator - I have seen many strange problems result from them.

HOWEVER: If you cannot find a BIOS upgrade and have no choice - of course that is the best course.

[lysergic]

And it is also not a good idea to leave the drive as an 8 gig drive if it is a 10. Have seen problems down the road with data corruption due to the LBA of the bios not being that of the drive.