NEED HELP SETTING MY HD

[Maxfly]

I just bought a new Hard Drive 20 Gig. However when I installed it the computer only recognises 2 gigs. How can I have the computer recognize the entire drive without partitioning into 10 different drive letters. PLEASE HELP!!!

Runing Win98

 

[Superwombat]

Are you booting off the win98 cd-rom?? it sounds like you may be booting off an old DOS boot disk.

 

[ranting]

How old is your motherboard ? If it's more than say, 2 years old, the problem might well be the BIOS that's unable to handle large HDs.
If this is the problem, you have 2 options: getting a new motherboard, or installing a piece of software called a "drive overlay". It basically bypasses the BIOS and thus enables Win98 to use all of the HD. Most major HD manufacturers (IBM, Seagate Maxtor) make drive overlays for their HDs afaik.

 

[AC]

in the BIOS settings, set translation to auto or LBA, that should solve your problem

only very old bioses don't support large drives (anything after p133 should be fine), but then u could get a bios upgrade

i'm asummming u have a fairly recent motherboard, so it should recognize all 20gb

also, make sure you have the jumpers on the drive set correctly; some drives have a feature to make themselves compatible with the above mentioned older bios by only showing the comp only 2gb

 

[Maxfly]

Thanks a lot guys. I solved the problem. What I did was go to westerndigital.com and download an utility called Data Lifeguard 2.5 (Is the new utility that replaces EZDRIVE)....Reformatted and booted with that program....It took less than 2 minutes to partition and program the HD....My computer and myself is very happy right now.........