80Gb disk only shows up with 32Gb in win2k

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kristian

kristian

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Ok, my brain is frazzled from just trying to get this thing put together, lemme explain my story.

My parents ave an ancient P-120 that is just death. I think they would like win2k since its about 4000x more stable than win98, so today I put together a concoction of computer parts mainly from an old Gateway PC. So its a proprietary mobo, and its a P3-450, 256Mb ram, and ATI rage graphics card, and some no name 10/100 card. I got ahold of a plextor cd drive, and i needed to buy a hard disk for them. I went to bestbuy and got a maxtor D740X 80Gb hard drive that came with a ATA 133 controller free. I'm going to be ever so slyly using this computer this summer vacation while i live with them for 3 months for some recording so I didn't want to have to use the ATA66 that was onboard, first of all because its slower, and second i don't think ATA66 recognises larger hard disks.

So where do I change this? I know it will require me to reinstall win2k, but thats no bugger, i just want all the other space. In the BIOS i have the IDE channels selected to "auto". what should i do?

By the way, i put this together for $300! I'm quite happy with how it turned out. They have a nice 17" monitor so I didn't have to worry about buying a new one of those.
 
So, the controller is a PCI card that your plugging the 80GB into right? Are there any other hard drives in the machine?

When you say 'setting them to Auto' are you looking at the gateway bios, or the bios on the PCI controller card you added?

One thing that comes to mind is that the controller card itself may not support 80GB drives, and needs it's EPROM flashed/updated via a flash program, and updated BIOS. This would be located at the manufacturer of the PCI controller cards, website.
 
yea its a PCI card, and i have the 80Gb plugged in as the master on the primary channel. I have the plextor cd drive in the mobo's IDE controller since it was needed to read the win2k cd. I have the gateway's bios set to auto. I can't remember how i have the bios set on my computer that i made, but that was much more simple since it had ATA133 support built in.

One last thing, the controller came in the box with the Maxtor drive. The controller card is made by maxtor (its a Promise chipset, so its not a no namer). And the reason they included it was for people like me who are dealing with computers that can't by default handle that large of a drive.
 
Did you use the setup, disk manager software that came with the maxtor? If it formated it using Fat32 that would explain the 32GB limit. If you want fat32 on that drive, you need to download the newest version of FDISK and Format. You would then boot from a 98 boot disk and Fdisk, then format, then install windows 2000. During fdisk it will report the correct size, but during format it may not report the correct drive size - after install of the OS it will report correctly.

I don't have links handy for those updated MS files. They were hard to find in the typical mess of a search engine at microsoft.com.

Or, just run the 2000 setup again, and have it format using NTFS and you should be able to see the full capacity.
 
The disk utility that came with the maxtor is not mean for NT4, XP, or 2000 it says. So i was left to use the win2k setup CD for the formatting of the disk. When it came time to install, i saw that it said 32Gb but i had the choice of NTFS. I ran an install because i had spent some much time today tring to get things up i wanted to get it into a win2k install. it works, so thats good. I'll go look around the MS site to see what they have.
 
woe is me

i misread the jumper guidelines. i read them backwards :D so now it works. wehay! next time i post i'll probably be in england. adios!
 
I got this from the Maxtor site

It appears that it has to do with your BIOS. I copied the part that applies to you. You can also check it out in the knowledge database at www.maxtor.com and look for the question under the FAQ "What is the definition of BIOS capacity barrier (Cylinder Limitiation)?"

32 GB limitation.
This condition is caused by the Award BIOS inability to address hard drives greater than 32GB. Award has been made aware of this issue and has fixed their "core" BIOS as of 6/99. They are passing this information along to the motherboard manufacturers' that use their BIOS. Updates for the BIOS should be available soon from individual motherboard manufacturers' to correct this problem. The following are options to overcome this hang condition:
Please contact your motherboard manufacturer, not Award, for a BIOS update.
If your motherboard manufacturer does not have an update available, purchase the Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 adapter as an alternative solution. Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 "Where to Buy"

Install the Capacity limitation jumper (J46) and use the Maxblast Plus installation software to complete the installation. Please refer to hard drive Installation Instructions for location of this jumper or refer below for an illustration of jumper locations. If your system still hangs after installing the J46 jumper, please run the file JUMPON.EXE.


Note: If the BIOS is believed to fall within the following guidelines but does not support the drive, contact the system or motherboard manufacturer for a potential upgrade to their product.

American Megatrends INC. (AMI): BIOS versions with a date of January 1, 1998 or newer.
Award: BIOS versions dated November 1997 or newer.
Phoenix: Version 4 Revision 6 or newer.
Note: Maxtor hard drives have a Cylinder Limitation Jumper to assist in the resolution of BIOS limitation issues. When this jumper is installed the MaxBlast Software must be used to complete the installation of the hard drive. Some Operating Systems will NOT function properly when the Capacity Limitation Jumper is applied (e.g., Windows NT, Linux, etc.).

There is some more information, but I would definitely have to say that it's a BIOS issue as Emeric said earlier. Hope this helps.
 
updated the bios

i updated the bios during my flurry of attempts at fixing the thing. it turned out to be the jumpers like i said. an oversight that 6 hours earlier when i was putting the thing together would have helped me and saved time. DOH!:eek:
 
Coincidentally, I was just having a similar problem myself. Just got an 80 gig drive, but fdisk from my 98se startup floppy said it was only 10.something gig. Fdisk from my MS DOS 6.2 recognized the drive, but the max partition it would allow was 20 gig. So when I read Emerics response I went to the knowledge base and found this fdisk update. I couldn't find anything about "Format" though.


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044


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