[dlw]

Installed a second hard drive, 20g.
W98SE only recognizes 7,544.74 of it.

How do I change this?

dlw

[Advertisements]

is this your primary hdd or a secondary hdd?

[Dragon]

is this your primary hdd or a secondary hdd?

[Tyger]

Installed a second hard drive, 20g.
W98SE only recognizes 7,544.74 of it.

How do I change this?

dlw

You make sure it's set to LBA (logical block address) mode in BIOS,

or upgrade the BIOS

or install drive overlay software from the drive maker on it or the boot device, preferably the boot device.

However, we can make much better reccomendations if you tell us the make/model of your motherboard or computer.

[dlw]

Well, lets see... get a broom out and dust this thing off.
It's an IBM Aptiva, 300mhz, 256m ram, 6.0g C:, 20g D:
No idea about the motherboard.
It's in a network to serve as backup.

The setup does not list LBA.

[Tyger]

Well, you can experimentally try some of the other drive settings and see if they help. You can also DL software from the drive maker's site that will correctly format the whole drive, whether Windows or BIOS sees it or not, and it can install overlay software on it too. However you might be better of to go to the C: drive maker's site and make a bootable floppy to install overlay software on it without affecting the operating system. The software is installed on the boot sector, in the master boot record, so it has to be done in ms-dos mode.

The IBM site still carries info on some of these older machines, but it isn't too likely you'll find a BIOS upgrade for it. You can certainly Google the model number, IBM has a weird numbering sysstem so you may need to try a couple of different things. You can likely at least find a manual in PDF format for it.

[Neil Jones]

Installed a second hard drive, 20g.
W98SE only recognizes 7,544.74 of it.

How do I change this?

dlw

You might not be able to, the system BIOS looks like it doesn't understand hard drives bigger than 8Gb.

Therefore if the BIOS can't see anything bigger than 8, Windows won't either.

Just out of interest, look on the drive to see if there's any jumpers to limit the capacity of the drive.

Quite a few systems of this age came out at a time when 6Gb was the upper limit and different systems react in different ways to a drive they don't quite know what to do with. Most just refuse to see it; others max out.

[Tyger]

You might not be able to, the system BIOS looks like it doesn't understand hard drives bigger than 8Gb.

Therefore if the BIOS can't see anything bigger than 8, Windows won't either.

Not so, the drive overlay software will allow the drive to exceed both BIOS and operating systems limitations, and the disk makers software will allow the whole drive to be formatted beforehand. I'm using a drive right now that was too big for Award 4.51pg BIOS but works with the overlay software.

[dlw]

Where do I get this overlay?

Don

[Tyger]

Where do I get this overlay?

Don

You can usually get it from the site of the mfr. of the drive you want to install it on. If you're not experinced in installing on a drive with an operating sysstem, get it from the maker of the 20gb drive and put it on it. Most mfrs. have a least a redirect page with

www.companyname.com

so if it's maxtor go to www.maxtor.com. Just download the big softwaare package and install it and follow the instructions, which are clearly written.

[Neil Jones]

Not so, the drive overlay software will allow the drive to exceed both BIOS and operating systems limitations, and the disk makers software will allow the whole drive to be formatted beforehand. I'm using a drive right now that was too big for Award 4.51pg BIOS but works with the overlay software.

Yes but the OP doesn't have any overlay software installed so the BIOS will only be seeing 8.4 at this time.

[Tyger]

Yes but the OP doesn't have any overlay software installed so the BIOS will only be seeing 8.4 at this time.

The drive that's in this machine right now is an 80gb Western Digital that I first put in a machine with the old Award 4.51pg BIOS, which only saw 32gb of it, but by using the software from WD I was able to format the whole drive and install overlay software on it. Right now it's in a machine that doesn't need the overlay software and I may uninstall it. And I've done the same with Maxtor and Seagate.