[mizark70]

I have a Western Digitial 20 gig harddrive that i got used. When i hooked the hard drive up it will only show 1.97 gig. Has anybody had this problem or know how to fix it? Thanks for the help

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I sounds like the drive isn't partitioned or formatted. Where are you checking the compacity of the drive?

[Titan8990]

I sounds like the drive isn't partitioned or formatted. Where are you checking the compacity of the drive?

[mizark70]

I just plugged it in and went to my computer and then clicked on the new hard drive and it will show 1.97.

[Neil Jones]

If the drive has been formatted FAT16 (if you right-click on it in My Computer and choose Properties it'll tell you the file system which is what we want) then FAT16 drives could only be formatted 2Gb, and if you wanted to use more than that, you'd need extra partitions, 2Gb at a time. This was the norm in Windows 95 days.

Edited by Neil Jones, 03 February 2008 - 03:56 AM.

[123Runner]

Also check to see if there is a jumper on the drive that limits the size.

[mizark70]

Neil Jones- the file system is NTFS

123 runner- what should i be looking for? Sorry, i know very little about adding new harddrives to a computer.

[Titan8990]

Follow these steps:

Right click on My Computer and select "Manage"

From the computer management screen select "Disk Manager" on the right

Now you should see a list of all your drives. Under the new one you should see 1.7GB under whichever drive letter that drive has partitioned

To the right of that should say unpartitioned space. If this is correct then you should be able to right click this unpartitioned space and select partition. This will allow you to now use that space. You may want to completly format the drive though.

Here is where you can check the jumper setting:




If it is the only thing on the IDE cable then you will want to set it to "master". If it is the second HDD on the IDE cable then you will want it set to slave. If it is on the same IDE cable as a CD drive then it should be set to master.

Edited by Titan8990, 03 February 2008 - 11:20 AM.

[mizark70]

Titan, i got the rest to partion. Thanks for your help, you guys are great.

[Titan8990]

Happy to help .