10 Gig Drive Shows As 1.5 Gig Drive

I have a friend who I have tried to help over the phone to solve a problem with the new Maxtor 10 gig 5400rpm ATA 100 hard drive is has purchased. When we go to FDISK, all we see is a non-DOS partition with a size of 1500 megabytes, or about 1.5 gigs. I had him delete the non-DOS partition and then displaying the partition information showed a primary partition of 1.5 gigs. So, I had him delete this partition, reboot to an A prompt and format C. then, we rebooted, went to FDISK, chose “Y” to enable LBA, and started with “Creating a Partition”. We chose to create a Primary partition but STILL show only 1.5 gigs to use as available free space.

What are we missing here? Why do we not have 10 gigs available? I had previously installed Partition Magic 7.0 for him but accessing it also shows only one partition, FAT32, at about 1.5 gigs.

Any help would be appreciated.

The board may not support a drive that large, some older boards were limited to 8GB.
Also have him check the "drive capacity limitation jumper". Maxtor drives are equipped with a jumper to limit the size of the drive to under 2GB so older machines can recognize them so you can install an overlay partition.
Also, try removing all partitions then rebooting before you install a partition.
Also make sure the BIOS is recognizing it as a 10GB drive.

If none of that helps, let us know what type of board you have and the BIOS date (off of the first screen at power on).

Another thing that might do it would be getting a PCI IDE ATA100 controller card, if the board doesn't do ATA100, getting a controller would be the best performing option. They are only about $30 online.

What was on this hard drive before? If was Linux or NT it has some interesting effects with windows fdisk.

If the bios sees the drive as a full 10 gigs when autodetected, then you need to run the diagnostics for the drive, possibly zero fill the drive. If the bios does not see it as a 10 gig drive then you are looking at a bios flash if one is available or a drive overlay.

Download the powermax utility from www.maxtor.com for the diagnostics, or try maxblast also from maxtor to partition and format the drive for you.

when your friend purchased the drive, he did redetect the new drive right? sounds like it may be using the old drives settings, or an Old BIOS any ideas what board it is and what his old drive capacity was??


G.

See if in bios appears 10 gb hard drive using autodetect.

If no: get new bios update from mainboard manufacturer.