rokhed71

I have an 80 Gig western digital hard drive that I want to use as an external USB storage device. When I look at the properties of the drive it's only showing up as a 32 Gig drive. I've tried re-formating in NTFS and the results are the same. How do I recover the rest of the drive? Thanks.

pharoah

hello rokhed71,and welcome to tsf.list the rest of your computers specs.if its an old computer,and depending on what operating system you have that may be it.

ceri sheeran

Hi,

Check the jumper settings on the drive. There is usually a jumper setting that limits the drive to 32GB for use on older systems.

Hard drives being used in external enclosures must also normally have the jumper settings changed to Master.

hth

Ceri

rokhed71

Ok I entered my system specs. This is my old computer that I use for work. The only reason I'm using it to troublshoot the hard drive is because I haven't bought a case for the hard drive. I have it plugged into the ide and am running like a slave. Does this matter? I had this loaded with windows and was using it as my main hd, even though from the first time I formatted it it was showing 32 Gig. I don't know if I did something wrong in the initial format. As I said I have formated it already and it's showing 31.4 Gig of free space. I tried changing the jumper setting to master and you can probably guess the results with the way I have it plugged in. No OS, no boot. Any other thoughts? Do I need to get a case and hope it will work? Thanks.

PanamaGal

Perhaps the size limitation is due to the BIOS. Are there any later BIOS revisions for your board available?

linderman

also if you format the drive with win xp and select Fat32 the whole drive will be limited to 32gigs ??????


does this sound like what may have happened ?

linderman

you could try using boot n nuke to totally erase and wipe the drive / after which you would re-partition and reformat the drive, but make sure you use NTFS right from the start


boot and nuke is in my siganture links

thats one suggestion, maybe some of our staff member will have other ideas to try ????

rokhed71

Still scratching my head. I used the cleaning program you recomended. It took a couple of hours. When I finished and rebooted I went to disk management and initialized and formated the drive. (NTFS) It still shows up as 31.4 GB. I went into setup and tried changing some of the settings to no avail. Even there it shows 31.4 and that's one of the settings it won't let me change. I'm getting real close to just purchasing a 400 GB usb. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

ceri sheeran

Hi,

Have you checked the drive jumper settings

Please post up the exact make and model of hard drive and the exact position that the drive jumpers are currently set to.

hth

Ceri

rokhed71

This is a western digital caviar ide 80 GB hard drive. At present I have the jumper set to slave. As stated earlier, I have the drive plugged into the IDE connector because I haven't I haven't bought a case for it yet. Not sure if this matters. If I make this drive master the computer won't boot as I don't have an OS loaded on the drive. It was going to be for storage only. Thanks.

hansoy

what's the OS used to partition na drive. the b4 sp1 xp only recognizes 132GB if your using below that the drive supported for the OS used to partition might only support upto 32GB. and bios should also support the size of the drive on older computers. I would suggest check the specs on the mother board and research the maximum hd size for your OS.

linderman

32 gig limitation could well be a Win 98 era bios ?????? is the machine you are trying to run this drive on old enough to have come loaded with win 98 when it was new ?????????


if so; your bios is too old to use more than 32gigs