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rich12321

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incorrectly formatted harddrive

I recently installed a new Maxtor 20G HD in my daughters computer.  It has a XE100 Plus mobo and is running Win98. I forgot to have the mobo automatically detect the HD before I formatted it so it was formatted as the old 4G HD.  My system has a newer Shuttle mobo, also running Win98.  Is there any way I can reformat the HD to 20G or am I stuck with a 4G, (20G,) HD?  I was going to reformat it on my system but mine sees it as a 4G HD also.
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jwitt98

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jwitt98

Before doing the above, in your bios, set the ide detection to auto as opposed to user.  If the bios detects a 20G drive, then your in business.  If it detects an 8.4G drive, then your bios likely doesn't have int 13 extensions in which case you will have to enable int 13 extensions in the bios setup or upgrade the bios in order to take advantage of the full 20G hard drive.
Also, one of the best programs I have found for quick partition management is Part at
http://www.ranish.com/part/
Boot with a floppy, or win98 bootable cd, and the run part off of a disk.  Allows you to make partitions much quicker than FDisk.

If setting the harddrive to auto or doing the Autodetection in the bios of your daughters computer correctly sees the drive, then you won't need to put it into yours.
I bet the drive has a C: and D: drive, right?
When you Partitioned the drive, using a Startup Disk to run FDISK, the first question you are asked is: Would you like to use Large Disk Support? [Y/N].  Large Disk Support is Fat32, which supports PARTITIONS larger than 2GB. If you choose NO for the question, the Primary DOS partition must be no larger than 2GB, and the Extended DOS partition (which contains drives D: - Z:) must be no larger than 2GB. If you choose YES at the prompt, partitions can be any size you like (TERABYTES).

Most likely you were limited to using 4GB of the drive when partitioning (2GB for each partition), and the only way to recover the missing 16GB is to repartition using Large Disk Support.

Not a solution to the "question", but to interject my opinion:
That Hard Drive is worth more than the rest of the system in its entirety. Don't you think 9 years of use has gotten your money's worth? Dude, get your daughter a DELL (or build her a newer system).  8^)