[Duffman75]

I am building a machine for niece and nephew, a PIII 450 on an AOpen MB. The new 40GB drive is seen in the BIOS (and retained by the BIOS) but when the WindowsME OS is fired up it (the drive) is seen as a 5.75GB.

I have formatted, fdisked and tried everything I can think of to recover the "lost" space but I am at a loss. Oh, the drive is a Seagate Barracuda.

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ok so u know what your doing i can assume. I had the same problem and it worked fine with windows xp. Me is just completely different in installing hardware. my brother is more of a computer nerd then me. And he couldn't get me to recognize mine was a 40gig and ME saw only 8.4gigs.

[hudihoo]

ok so u know what your doing i can assume. I had the same problem and it worked fine with windows xp. Me is just completely different in installing hardware. my brother is more of a computer nerd then me. And he couldn't get me to recognize mine was a 40gig and ME saw only 8.4gigs.

[Tyger]

Windows ME should have no problem seeing a drive of that size. There are several things you can do. Go into setup and make sure the hdd detection is set for auto, both settings, for the master drive. It may be looking for a smaller drive with a certain size. Make sure you have any MS updates relating to drive problems. Go to the computer and motherboard mfrs web site and see if there are any BIOS or chipset upgrades. Be very careful installing BIOS upgrades and follow the instructions fully. Another possibility is to manually set the BIOS for the drive characteristics.

What version of BIOS does it have, and what is the make and model of computer?

If you Google the problem you may find that other people with the same computer have solved it.

[Samm]

Use a windows 98 boot disk then run fdisk. Does fdisk recognise the drive size correctly and the file format (system) - eg should be reporting FAT32 on primary dos partition.

If not, then you may need to replace the boot sector/partition table of the drive. Let me know what fdisk reports first.

[Duffman75]

Ok, this is a mongrel (lots of different parts) machine but the important thing is that it is an Aopen MB (AX6BC R2.53), with an Intel PIII 450 CPU and a Seagate Barracuda HDD

have flashed the BIOS OK. The BIOS sees and retains the Draive as 40GB.
I have Fdisked and the primary DOS partition isGB with FAT 32.

I've formatted and relaoded ME (I know this shouldn't make any difference) and sure enough it still it tells me I've got 5.75GB on the HDD when the BIOS tells me otherwise.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I am off to MS web site to see if they can help.

BTW I had an old version of Partition Magic (5.0) and tried it but it doesn't like ME

[Duffman75]

Of course the previous post should have said 40 GB when Fdisked

[Sultec]

Isn't there a DOS limit somewhere about that 5.7 figure?