Computer and I are having lovers quarrel

  • Thread starter Thread starter Even
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Even

Even

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Here I am with a 10 gig hard drive that only knows it has 2. I loaded win90hate and did the dreaded FAT32. Seemingly every program after that was a damn illegal operation. I ditched the 98.. partitioned til the cows came home, loaded 95.. and now.. 2 gigs. not to mention it won't realize I have a seperate sound card until I show it the box it came in. any clues?
 
This sounds like a BIOS setup problem... perhaps, you'll need to offer a bit more information.

1) Is this 10GB the primary drive that you're booting Windows from?
2) How are you partitioning the drive? What program are you using? What partition sizes are you specifying? etc
3) What BIOS do you have (Award, AMI, proprietary, etc) and how old is it? (how old is your computer is a good enough answer)
4) How is your HD setup from the BIOS? (is it detected automatically at bootup...did you manually enter the settings?...did you run a Detection routine to get the settings? Did you do nothing at all?)
5) What is the physical location of the drive (that is, IDE1 Master/slave, IDE2 Master/slave)?
6) What do you mean "every program was an illegal operation"? This leads me to believe that this 10GB drive is not the drive you're running windows from?

Don't worry about the soundcard crap until you actually get windows installed properly. In otherwords, get the drive setup right!

Also, if you created 2 partitions, you have to format them both!

There's a lot that could be said here but it would all be guessing until you give us some answers to the above questions. Good luck.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Ok heres what I can offer. let me toss out the illiteracy disclaimer first. This is a generic PC. Celeron 433MHz. Just a couple of months old. The shop sent me into the CMOS deal and I confess, I hit a few switches. This is my one and only hard drive. I used win95 Fdisk to do the partitioning. I just went into BIOS to scare up some specs for you. perhaps this will help...
Primary Master:user
Size:10802 Cylinder:20929 Head:16
Sec:63 second boot device: IDE-0
C000, 32k shadow: cached
PCI IDEBusmaster: enabled
Onboard IDE: both

I scared up the partition info from fdisk...
C:1 Status:A Type: primary DOS
MBytes:2047 System:FAT16 Usage: 20%

does this help at all? thanks so much
 
Oh duh, I should have thought of this earlier.

You're setup just fine, the problem is that you probably didn't enable FAT32 support when you ran fdisk. The very first thing fdisk should ask you is if you want to enable large disk support...say YES!

FAT16 used by DOS and still recognized by NT and Win95/8 limited your drive size to 2GB.

If you don't get the "Would you like to enable large disk support" question when you start fdisk....you're running a pretty old version of fdisk! In fact, I think the first time I saw FAT32 support was when I installed OSR/2..I don't think I saw that with the first release of 95...which you shouldn't be using anyway. Oh well, long time ago.

You'll have to start over and repartition, enabling FAT32. I'm really sorry that I didn't catch that right away...could have saved you some time! Good luck!

(BTW, if your FDISK doesn't ask you about FAT32, I'm sure you can either download a current version somewhere or someone can email it to you)

Slackmaster2k
 
Ok Bravo and thank you! I am going to give it a shot. Thanks a ga-zillion. FAT32 on the way
 
I have ten gigs again! Thanks chief. As it stands all is well. I don't expect it to last mind you, soon god will find out I am up and running and thwart me in some new way.But as it stands I thank you.
 
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