Storage Solutions 30GB HDD only shows 8,1GB, wtf?

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lukitas_rl

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Hi there friends. I´ve been having some troubles with my hdd, its a Quantum Fireball 30GB. One day i turned on my pc and there was only 1.0GB available. So i formatted it, and made a dos partition with Fdisk. But now its only 8gb available, and the partition i made is on 100%! Another wired thing is that the BIOS shows me Primary HDD: 8.0Gb! WTF? anyone? help!:huh:
 
If the BIOS reads it as a 30 GB harddisk it may be faulty.

You just bought it new right?

Or was it Fine earlier?
 
The bios reads it as a 8Gb harddisk. I bought it 6 months ago, and it was working fine. I wonder what would´ve happened
 
Dunno, lets see if the other Techies here can help.

Possibly a Virus? or Damage to the HDD?

Hold on a second.. You Formatted and partitioned... theres the problem.. youve left the 22 GB as unpartitioned space. Format it again and Remove the partition.
 
ill do as you say, but i dont think that will work, cause the bios still reads it as a 8gb disk. Ill try anyway, thanks a lot!
 
thanks, im still trying,
i wonder if it does not recognize it cause its fat32 and win98me does not read "big" hdds. ill try to find some XP cd and we´ll see. Thanks a lot to everyone
 
Hehe, my freind uses a 250Gb HDD with Win98, isn't that big enough :P ?

Its not an OS issue, just a HDD jumper thing. I knew how to fix it, but forgot now...

Can't open my case and check cause I'm using SATA...
 
hi lukitas_rl ,

may b u hav partitioned ur disk using fat16 format.u should hav tried it with fat 32 file system.only fat 32 supports large disks not fat 16.plz try this out.:cool2: :cool2: :cool2:
 
Also if you are hving trouble with the jumpers behind the disk then I suggest that you remove the jumper altogether and let the HDD controller decide whether it is master or slave.

EDIT- What the hell was I talking. WHat i wanted to say was that if it has two jumpers behind the disk then you should see if they are correct. Nut since this problem cropped up suddenly without your doing anything it cant be that.
 
yup might jumper setting behind the disc is misplaced........and very less chance is that the format is different..lik fat 16 fat32/or ntfs.....or u tried linux as a partition or wht....guys wont once a deep format i mean deleting all partition using fdisk help???
 
Well your mobo is old and doesnt support LBA32 properly. You need a driver from the disk maker to be loaded first so that the OS can detect the complete drive or else upgrade your motherboard. First try looking for a bios update of your motherboard. If you cant find it, then look for a bootstrapping driver for the drive else get a new board. I'm surprised that there are so many stupid irrelevant posts in this thread. This is a rather common problem! For info of others, FAT16 only supports drives upto 2GB and FAT32 upto 32GB IIRC. This is a bios issue.
 
After trying the other suggestions about the jumper....

I used to do this years back so I vaguely remember that there used to be a question fdisk asks which is on the first screen after running fdisk which was to the effect "enable large partitions Y/N" ... I am not sure about the exact wording of this text... but hit "Y" and you will get larger than 8gb partitions available. If this too fails then try fdisk and format fromh a winme boot disk and see if that helps - get a winme bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com
 
Chaos said:
Well your mobo is old and doesnt support LBA32 properly. You need a driver from the disk maker to be loaded first so that the OS can detect the complete drive or else upgrade your motherboard. First try looking for a bios update of your motherboard. If you cant find it, then look for a bootstrapping driver for the drive else get a new board. I'm surprised that there are so many stupid irrelevant posts in this thread. This is a rather common problem! For info of others, FAT16 only supports drives upto 2GB and FAT32 upto 32GB IIRC. This is a bios issue.
Click to expand...

Chaos.. MON GURU.... I would have said the same thing ...but... lukitas_rl says that it was working fine till he did a reformat.... this makes me suspect that the "enable large drive" thingy in fdisk has not been enabled. RIGHT ?

About FAT32 and limit of 32gb.... I was till recently running 2 120GB drives as FAT32 and single partitions of 120gb each - no problems. Was this possible by some sort of translation done by the BIOS ?
 
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