Hard Drive

desooperdesooper
edited March 2005 in Hardware
I need a little advise here, I have a HITACHI DESKSTAR 80G Hard drive, I want to use it as a back up, I install it in my computer and right click on the drive and click on format it says it says it is only a 31.4G, can any one help me here, I have a DELL 2.4 1G RAM, I also tried the jumpers to cable select, slave and just removed them all together, thank you for all the help.

Comments

  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited March 2005
    The way I see it, and there may be other ways to accomplish what you want, there are 2 ways to go.
    1. Disconnect your primary drive and put the 80 Gig in its place as master. Boot from an XP cd and and wipe out the partitions on the drive. Then create a partition that encompasses the whole drive or whatever you now want it to be. Shut down the computer. Reconnect the original system drive as master (the way it was before) and the new 80 Gig as slave, boot and do what you did before and the whole drive should be there to format or you should see whatever partitions you created above.

    2. Get a program such as Partition Magic or the like and remove all of the partitions on the 80 gig drive, then create one partition as big as you can and rock-on.
  • desooperdesooper
    edited March 2005
    I had it as a master and it still only read 34.1G.
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited March 2005
    I still think you're only looking at a partition, not the drive and you MUST wipe out the partition to get access to the entire drive. I forgot to ask, what OS are you doing this under?
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2005
    Flintstone wrote:
    I still think you're only looking at a partition...
    I second that. :)
  • desooperdesooper
    edited March 2005
    Flintstone wrote:
    I still think you're only looking at a partition, not the drive and you MUST wipe out the partition to get access to the entire drive. I forgot to ask, what OS are you doing this under?

    I am using xp home and what I did is I installed it as the master drive deleted the partition and then went in to install the os and it only read 34.1G.
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited March 2005
    If all you did was delete a partition, then you might have left part of the job undone. After you deleted the partiton you had to create a new one to format. You had to choose the size of the new partition to create from the available, non-partitioned space. How big was the partition you then created? If you didn't create a new partition, then you are attempting to format yet another pre-existing partition and you should go back and delete ALL of the partitions on the disk and make one big one or new smaller ones-whatever you want. But, at least then, you'll see the whole drive.

    Was this a new drive or did you get it from someone or somewhere else? You see, there must be a partition that you can't see and are therefore unable to to delete. When you format, you are formatting a partition, so apparently the partition you're formatting is only 34.1 Gigs.

    The other possibility, and this is why I asked where the drive came from, is that there is a partition on the drive the partitioning routine can't see and therefore can't delete. Then a low level format is the way to go. But, I doubt it is the case.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2005
    Exactly, Flintstone. :thumbsup:

    For example: A Linux partition would probably not be visible to Windows.

    I use the old DOS Diskedit program to zero out my drives. There are other utilities (including some available from many HD manufacturers) which will do the same thing. If you need help finding one, just holler.

    Other possibilities: If the BIOS on you MB is very old it may not see a drive beyond a certain size. If your existing drive is substantially larger than 34GB then that is not likely to be the case. It is also possible that your jumpers are in the wrong place. Many drives have a jumper setting to limit (clip) the drive to a certain size, mainly for compatibilty reasons pertaining the the BIOS issue I just mentioned.

    What is the exact model of the HD and what is the date of your BIOS? :)
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