[TOm Scott]

I am stumped. I have a Hitachi Deskstar 250 gig PATA drive, 8mb cache, 7200 rpm, that got formatted up to 137gig on original installation (new disk, no operating sys on machine at install)

I now want to format it to the full 250gig on Windowa 2k machine, and can't figure out how to do it.

Al the format instruction I know simply reformat the disk to the 137 size.

Attempts to resize the partition also unsuccessful.

What am I missing?

Tom Scott

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What operating system are you using? If you are using a win 98 or win me boot disk they have the 137 gig limit on the size because that is the DOS limit. Download and make a set of XP boot disks and you should be able to format the whole drive. As a note your motherboard may be causing the limit from the BIOS also.

http://support.micro...kb;en-us;310994

SRX660

[SRX660]

What operating system are you using? If you are using a win 98 or win me boot disk they have the 137 gig limit on the size because that is the DOS limit. Download and make a set of XP boot disks and you should be able to format the whole drive. As a note your motherboard may be causing the limit from the BIOS also.

http://support.micro...kb;en-us;310994

SRX660

[TOm Scott]

I am using Win2k, SP4 and the motheboard BIOS recognizes the fact that the drive is a 250gig capacity dirve. I also have another 250 gig drive as the master, the problematic drive is "slave" with jumper set to cable select.

The machine runs fine in all respects but I need to get this Hitachi drive formatted to 250gig BEFORE I configure RAID.

Neither drive is connected to the RAID facility. Just straight IDE.

[makai]

I would suggest you contact Hitachi and ask them to send you their Disk Manager software. They do not provide it on-line any longer, but will mail you the CD. I ordered one myself and received the CD in 2 days. Use Disk Manager to partition/format your drive... it's much quicker. From the sound of your post, I imagine you can afford to wait a few days to build the raid array since your computer is already running.

Here's the Hitachi Download webpage in case you need other drive utilities.

[TOm Scott]

THANK YOU MAKAI !!

I have theHitachi Disk manager (came with the new disk) . On prior attempts, Disk manager did not notice that W2k had a registry setting such that it could not recognize greater than 137 (thats is confusing because it seems to be able to recognize the other drive just fine.

Anyhow, Disk Manager recognized this attribut on this go around, made the registry change, rebooted, and I proceeded to reformate to the full 250gig.

Thank you, again.

Now on to setting up RAID.

[makai]

Well, I'm glad you got things going. BTW, it sounds like you're running Disk Manager from within windows instead of DOS.

I tend to run any Disk Manager software by booting to the CD... which will load DOS. It takes any existing OS out of the picture and just works on the disk itself. It runs really quick when partitioning and formatting. If you are running from within windows, the next time you decide to redo your machine, try booting from the CD and working it in DOS. I think you'll like it better.

Aloha!!