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Grex Micros Item 242: Win 98 only recognizes half of hard drive on Dell Notebook
Entered by raven on Thu Jul 26 06:46:49 UTC 2001:

I just bought a used Dell CPt notebook computer.  Celeron  466, 64 megs of
ram,the problem is Windows only recognizes 2 gigs of a 4.5 gig hd.  That's
Windiows 98 second edition BTW.  Does anyone have any idea what the problem,
might be here? Thanks!

7 responses total.

#1 of 7 by scott on Thu Jul 26 12:22:36 2001:

Quite often new PCs are set up with a 2 gig partition for the C: drive because
that's the addressing limit for old 16 bit Windows programs.  You might see
if there's a D: drive (possibly unformatted) of the rest of the disk.  You
could also boot on a DOS diskette and run fdisk to look at the partition
table.

We've got an older Dell laptop at the office which sees all of its 6 gig disk
just fine, so I doubt it would be a BIOS issue.

#2 of 7 by raven on Thu Jul 26 14:27:29 2001:

Hmm well under "my computer" it doesn't show a d drive.  This computer is from
last year, with Win 98 second edition.  It's not the bios because that's where
I found out it's 4.5 gigs.  Would something like partition magic which does non
destructive partitions perhaps recover the space?

#3 of 7 by scott on Thu Jul 26 15:13:01 2001:

Try a command line boot and then fdisk to see if the space is in the partition
table.  From there you could probably set it up as a D: drive and then format
it.

#4 of 7 by gull on Fri Jul 27 14:35:14 2001:

You don't need partition magic if the space is unallocated, because there's
nothing in it to destroy.  You can use fdisk to create a new partition in
it.  Just don't touch the 'delete partiton' option and you'll be fine.

If you want to expand your current partition to fill the drive, then yes,
you'll need Partition Magic.

#5 of 7 by scott on Fri Jul 27 14:53:29 2001:

And what's with the new laptop, anyway?  Wasn't the Tandy 100 enough?  ;)

#6 of 7 by raven on Tue Jul 31 14:55:09 2001:

fdisk did the tricj, thanks all.  The Tandy 100 is a nice stone age relic,
but I would need a beowolf cluster of a thousand of thhem to run dreamkweaver.

#7 of 7 by raven on Fri Aug 3 04:59:00 2001:

Besides my notebook now has 256 megs of ram compared to the 100s
24k, things change fast I'm typing this from Linux dual boot on the notebook.

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