Hard drive size not recognised by win98SE

Hi Guys.
My poor little laptop has just had a clean install of win98SE and all
is well apart from the problem that the 12 gig hard drive isn't
recognised. The properties of the C drive say it is a 2.1 gig.
Is there a way for a simple, non-techie type like me to get the drive
to show as the true size?
Cheers,
Steve

 

You have the drive formatted as FAT rather than FAT32. You have 3 choices:

-Live with it (you can create additional partitions in the unused 10
gigs, and they can be FAT32)

-Start over, reformat the drive, reinstall Windows, this time do it right

-Partition Magic can convert a FAT partition to a FAT32 partition. It
usually works, but occasionally there is data loss and you have to start
over. Be certain to back up anything important first, in case the
partition is lost completely (doesn't happen often, but can happen
infrequently).

 

Barry Watzman wrote:

snip

snip

The advice to back-up is not to be overlooked but I have yet to see
conversion with PM from Fat to Fat32 fail. The other way round, yes,
indeed, and even frequently but this way ... Cleaning-up the partition
to be converted of unnecessary trash, temp files, would be a good
precaution too.

One way to make the conversion process easier and safer would be:

Above all, create the rescue diskette suggested by PM, then

1/ with PM, first make a copy of the partition to be converted and make
sure to store it and the furthermost end of the disk. This way, if
something happens, booting from a PM diskette will allow you to copy
back the initial boot partition.
2/ Convert the boot partition and then make sure that it boots.
3/ Once you are confident the conversion process worked fine, you can
expand the Fat32 partition to the desired size, if necessary after
deleting the backed-up partition to make th whole drive available.

Regards

 

Thanks for the advice, guys.
It's a pretty tricky situation though so I may just leave it as it is.
The main problem is that the laptop, a Libretto 100CT, doesn't have a
CD drive except for a PCMCIA one. If the Fdisk thing goes belly up and
formats the drive, I can't reload windows.

 

Steve,

No one here advised you to use Fdisk. Using Partition Magic will solve
your problem, with almost no risk if you follow the advice you were given.

Regards

 

Hi guys,
I realise this post will probably never be seen but I thought it only
polite to let you know what happened.
I got hold of Partition Magic and loaded it on the laptop.
The hard drive showed up as having a C drive and a D drive + something
where the drive letter was replaced by (*).
I managed to figure out how to change the C drive from FAT to FAT32
without deleting any files and then I made the C drive take most of the
space from the D drive.
I now have an 8+ gig drive and that's good enough for me.
Thanks for your help.
Steve

 

The * "drive" is unallocated space.