Partition problem, lost space.

Hello there, I'm at a friends home and trying to install a new hard drive.
It's a Maxtor 250 gb disk and we have no problem finding the drive.
BUT the problem is that it only recognizes it as a 8gb drive in both Bios and Fdisk.

I mean, we know that it works since I can create a 8gb partition. I've deleted the partition and redone it but no, I just can't get that lost space to even show.

Would be very greatful for some help.

Thanks.

What OS are you trying to use? And, what are the specs on this computer?

wasent this posted before ?? cuz i think it was solved if u look there u might find ur solution to the problem but i wish i knew more about hard drives and how to put it back to 250 gb but i dont sorry .. i hope this helps

The Skirge,

If it's being recognized as being 8Gb by the BIOS then its not an OS problem.

In the CMOS configure tool, is the harddrive set to auto or are there actual parameters for it? (Like Number of Sectors and so on)

Also when you use fdisk did you make sure that you enabled support for large disks?

That's a good point. If you have an older motherboard and BIOS, it might be set up the old way of manually defining sectors, heads, etc. If it has an auto detect feature, see it that will recognize the correct amount. I don't remember the technical aspect of it, but older BIOSs can only read up to 8GB and the rest of the space an not be accessed. You may look and see if there is a BIOS update for you motherboard, or the only fix may be a motherboard replacement. BTW, was the old hard drive above or below 8GB?

If you get an IDE controller card with its own bios, I believe you can overcome the 8GB barrier and I believe 8GB was one.

maybe the harddrive was "fixxed".

The OS is the key factor here. Let's wait for the answer on it.

Make sure logical byte addressing is enabled. You must use this on drives over 120GB, and old computers might not support it.

also check the jumpers on the hard drive itself, some hard drives have a jumper to limit space if you wish so check that it's not on there and might be limiting the hard drive to 8gb, otherwise the computer is to old and only supports upto 8GB.

As far as I can understand, You should be able to create/Access about 8.4 GB disk partition.

The reason is..., Older BIOS used to use 3 bytes (i.e. 24 bits) to hold the information of Cylinders-Heads-Sectors of the Hard Disk and since you can not hold the information of more than 8.4 GB Hard Disk by this approach, BIOS translation fails after 8.4 GB limit

You should enable the Large Hard Disk Support in your BIOS settings. If there is no other Problem, the complete disk should be accessible. it is known as Large Hard Disk support..

If you're still not able to solve the Problem,
Please Describe in details and feel free to mail me...
Regards,

Tarun Tyagi
(Author: Data Recovery with & without Programming)
Data Doctor India Inc.
J-110, Patel Nagar - 1,
Ghaziabad (U.P.), India - 201001
Phone: (+91)9868337762, (+91)9350190934
email: tt@datadoctor.biz
http://www.Datadoctor.biz