120GB Hard Drive seems weird , in Dos it formats as 46GB

**s8n** · July 25th, 2005, 05:51 AM

hi team......i have a brand new 120GB Hard Drive and it seems weird.....my Motherboard bios identifies it as 120GB , FDisk recognizes it as 120GB Fat32 Partiton and Windows 98 recogizes it as 120GB, but when format it in Dos it formats as 46GB

also i was wondering if a External USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Box would help....or i heard a Maxtor Ultra-ATA 133 PCI adapter might help ?

any help is sweet

s8n

**Platypus** · July 25th, 2005, 06:31 AM

There is a problem with the Win98 FORMAT.EXE correctly displaying sizes beyond 64GB. The formatting itself should turn out to be be correctly done, Microsoft's information is here:

Format Displays Size of Partitions or Logical Drives Larger Than 64 GB Incorrectly

**s8n** · July 25th, 2005, 06:40 AM

ive heard of this before.....and i thought it was the fix to the problem........but when i copy a file that is over 1GB to the new 120GB it gives me an error msg.....same as when i try and copy a file that is over 1GB from another drive to the 120GB. ....

**Platypus** · July 25th, 2005, 07:15 AM

Is this being used as your Windows boot drive? If not, you could format it from within Windows, as you note Windows correctly sees the drive. If it is your boot drive, and you are using one single 120G partition, I would suggest it's much better to have a Primary partition under 8GB for Windows and applications, then the remainder for data. The second partition can then once again be formatted from within Windows once installed onto the Primary partition.

**s8n** · July 25th, 2005, 10:45 PM

its a Secondary drive ATA/33.....yea ive tried formating it in Win98 and it formats really fast for some reason......like 5mins....my key to knowing its not working is ....formating in Win98 takes 5mins....and the main part i cant copy/paste files that are larger than 2gig , to and from the drive (120GB drive).

my Motherboard is GigaByte 8IEX dated 06/21/2002 i heard by 2 people it my be too old........i read on 2 sites a Maxtor Ultra-ATA 133 PCI adapter will get it working as it is a new host adapter..... i need more confirmed reports tho before i buy a ATA 133 PCI adapter.

**format c:** · July 26th, 2005, 02:15 AM

If the bios sees the drive as 120 gig and Windows reports it as 120 gig then you have a software error
I would delete the partition on the 120 gig, after backing up any data and start over again
Repartiion and format under windows using the dos prompt and fdisk
Check your jumper settings on the new drive as well, Is it a slave to your boot drive, them make sure the jumpers are set that way
A rule of thumb with drives is Optical drives on the secondary channel and Hard drives on the primary channel
May I suggest you make the 120 gig your boot drive and partition it in two , it would probalby be a faster drive than your present boot drive
Another solution is to use partition magic or go to www.bootdisk.com and download an image of a boot floppy with an updated version of fdisk and try from there

**confus-ed** · July 26th, 2005, 03:23 AM

Originally Posted by s8n

....and the main part i cant copy/paste files that are larger than 2gig , to and from the drive (120GB drive)..

So hang on a minute, what version of 'dos' got used to format the disk ? what I've quoted is generally the result of a FAT16 format, when you probably meant to use FAT32 ..

Whether that'll make any sense to you I dunno .. but hopefully anyways it'll set off the right kind of questions !

**s8n** · July 26th, 2005, 10:56 PM

i changed the 120GB over to the IDE1 and reset the jumpers , FDisk it and formatted (i use FDisk for large HDD version)....still it says in Dos 46GB when formatting.....but when its finishes formatting it says 114GB formatted.....cool but......when i put Windows 98SE on the 120GB i still get the error in Win98 when transferring files back and forth that are over 2 GB+ .....the error is everytime "Cannot create or replace copy of Gen-CFJPAL : The parameter is incorrect "........i get this same msg with other file types too...(files over 2G+)

**Platypus** · July 27th, 2005, 04:23 AM

I don't have the drive space on a 98 machine to check this myself, but I suspect this is a normal Win98 limitation, as noted here:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/discus/m...tml?1099765708

"A little known problem I found out last week is that Win98SE explorer cannot copy or move a file larger than 2GB (a bug in shell32.dll M$ refuses to fix despite knowing about it for 3 years or more)"

A number of other applications suffer the same restriction, due to the use of signed integers, limiting values to 2^31 rather than the 2^32 of an unsigned integer which allows the 4GB maximum filesize on FAT32.

If you have been able to copy larger files on a previous installation, something may have updated shell32.dll from the Ver 4.72 installed with Win98. But I don't know what it would have been - according to MS, IE6 doesn't update shell32.dll. This could be one of the few ways WinME is superior, as I gather the Ver 5.0 shell32.dll it uses can handle files up to the full 4GB. I don't know whether 98 can use a V5 .dll though.

Another workaround could be an alternative file manager that bypasses the API calls to shell32.dll. For example I believe Thumbs Plus can copy and move graphics files larger than 2GB on Win98.

**jammin_johnney** · August 15th, 2005, 07:50 AM

What you are seeing <when this drive formats> is an incorrect
size. The fix UPDate your _fdisk_ to a newer version.
Try www.bootdisk.com. Get "new fdisk" there.
jammin_johnney