Preserved Topic: Computer problems

Ok i've got 2 problems both involing my harddrive....

about a month or so my 1.5 gig hardddrive died so i went out and bought a 40gig hard drive

in Bios it says its 40gig;s but in window it's only telling me it's 4 ,,, i can only store 4 gigs worh on it and every where i check up its only 4 gig's why?
seconldy when i doube click on the (C in My cpomputer it gives me a opup box asking me to point it at the localtion of Setup.exe.. why? i've never had this problem before

can anyone help me resolve these problems?

I remember, with our very first computer, we wanted to get a larger hard drive, but found out before we did so that our mother board would only be able to recognize 2 gigs anyway. So we didn't bother. Perhaps you're having the same problem - old motherboard?

Also try a scan disk, though I'm not sure if that would really help or even be supposed to help.

how is your drive formatted? fat16 or fat32? fat16 has a 4G limitation, i think (~64K clusters * 64K each ~ 4G) i guess this would be your main problem. i'm clueless about the other one. perhaps reinstall the OS?

of course, there might be the motherboard problem... but since the bios says it's 40G, i rather doubt that

I imagine it may be formatted improperly, with only a single 4Gb partition.

It sounds to me like an older PC made before anyone imagined the possibility of the huge hard-drives we have today. I have such an old beast, fortunately it's no longer my main PC.

The issue lies in the BIOS. See if you can download an updated one from your motherboard manufacturer. Make absolutely certain that the BIOS is an exact, precise match for your motherboard model and revision number. There's no such thing as "close enough". Installing (called "flashing") the wrong BIOS will result in a dead PC.

Failing that, there may have been setup disks in the package with your drive. Maxtor ships "EZ-BIOS" with theirs, Seagate uses something similar on the SEA Tools disk. If not, you can download "drive overlay" software from the hard-drive manufacturer. Read the docs, especially the part about the 4.3GB "limit", then install and use as directed.

I have a vintage 1994 Gateway (with a vintage 1992 Award BIOS) which can't see anything bigger than 2GB by itself. I stuffed a 30GB Maxtor and a 40GB Seagate into it and they both run happily by using the drive overlay provided by the HD manufacturers.

Hope this helps!

"the most incredible feats are often accomplished by
those who have had the most incredible challenges"

i think ill go wih the formarted wrong ,, becuse i only bought my mother board 6months ok...
i rember when installing the harddrive all's that i did was a quick formart do you think that may of been the problem?

It's like lacapaca and Wes said: If your BIOS tells you that it's a 40 GB drive then everything's OK with it and the mainboard.

Do you have a Win 98 boot disk? Boot from that disk, enter fdisk and choose FAT 32 support. Then hop through the menues until you manage to delete the 4 GB partition you should find there and create a new 40 GB primary partition. After a re-boot, you'll have to format the new partition and re-install Windows. That should also fix the problem with Windows looking for the Setup.exe.

kuckus (cell #282)

[This message has been edited by kuckus (edited 07-27-2002).]

ok guys il give that ago thanks for your help