120GB hard drive only showing as 52GB

[Craig Tucker]

I have just bought an IBM deckstar 120gb hard drive. When I run fdisk to create a primary dos partition it only shoes it as being 52261MB. In the Bios it shows it as 123GB on boot up it says 123MB but I am assuming this is a misprint. I have win98se with fat 32 file system, can anyone help.

Craig

[aguillon]

Strange indeed. Maximum size of a FAT 32 harddisk if you use the 4k cluster size is about 1 tetrabite.

Check this for details
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q184006

Which operating system are you using? Could be a OS limitation.

[kinneera]

I believe this is a known problem with fdisk. Are there no tools included with the drive for setting up and formatting the drive? If there are, you should use them, not fdisk.

[Sulik]

I got the same problem on WinME.
fdisk would actually hang on startup when trying to do anything with my new IBM 80GB hard drive.
That's what made me upgrade to Windows XP -> clean install 80GB NTFS partition - never looked back.

[mikerios]

kinnera,

i'ld ill advise using ANY hard drive overlay ( EZ Drive, Diskmanager ) as they are not the solution to an older bios that cannot handle really large drive translation or the OS, as 98se / Me has a limit of 80 gb, Windows 2000 can handle up to 137 ( more if you use a Raid controler as it does all the drive translation for the OS ) and XP can handle 137 and beyond.

[Craig Tucker]

Thanks for all the replies.
The disk came with no literature, so I looked at IBM's web site and downloaded some software called disk manager 2000, which was able to format the drive to it's full capacity under win98, not dos. This was also much quicker than using fdisk and format.

[tinycorkscrew]

I hope you don't plan on using the drive for more than 8 hours a day.

See the second article on this page:

http://www.storagereview.com/

[lusid]

There is a patched version of Fdisk available somewhere on the m$ site that can fdisk drives over 60gigs. There is an interesting bug in the version released in the 9x operating systems, which results in it incorrectly calculating the size of hard drives over 60gigs.