StuartAdkins
asked on
Hard Drive Formating
I have recently be given an old 3.2Gb hard drive which I was going to us to build up a basic system, but when I have come to format the drive it only formats to 507MB. I have tried deleting and creating the HD partition but still the same problem occurs, am I doing something really silly, why will it not format at 3.2Gb ?
Are you using a 486 or first generation of pentium ?
If yes, that means your pc's bios cannot support a hdd with a space more than 512mb ! maybe you should think of an upgrade.
eric.
If yes, that means your pc's bios cannot support a hdd with a space more than 512mb ! maybe you should think of an upgrade.
eric.
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I tried to set all the bios setting for the primary master to auto but the problem remained, so I tried running the bios auto detection for the HD and it set the Cylinder,Heads etc up successfully. Once that was done fdisk created the correct partition size. Thanks for the advice.
My pleasure, glad I could help.
If it didn't the reasons for that could be your BIOS doesn't support 3.2 Gb or that there are still partitions on the hard disk. If the second remove all partitions and then recreate one big partition. If the first then update your BIOS.
Check that your BIOS recognises it as a 3.2 Gb drive instead of perhaps a 512 Mb drive.
If the format is finishing early and giving error messages then possibly your hard drive is stuffed. You could try and fix it by using the disk utils supplied by the hard disk manufacturer which can be obtained from their website.