Guys, I have what is a perplexing problem.For a number of different reasons, I decided it was time to format the Operating System drive of my computer. Well, it doggedly refused to format despite a number of different things that I tried so I resorted to an FDISK. Now that the drive has been given a thorough lobotomy, I'm noticing a problem trying to put it all back together again. The drive in question is a 120 GB WDC drive. Up until now it's performed flawlessly.When I re-set the partitions, it reports it's maximum size as 73 GB. What gives here? How can I re-claim the rest of that drive.ThxBobL

Hi Bob,FDISK is a real primitive and I have to redo a disk several times before I get it going the way I want. One uses FDISK so seldom, its less than user friendly interface is not helpful.I would restart your computer with a FLOPPY or CD drive to the DOS or Command Prompt. Restart FDISK and use the option to view what is installed as drives, etc. I suspect that you only partitioned part of your drive. Also, I don't know if FDISK has a limitation to the size disk you have.The other thing is if you installed the drive, you should have gotten a disk/CD from WDC. It may have better utilities to partition/format the diskdrive. If you don't have an utilities disk/CD, visit WDC website for downloads.Personally, I don't like having only one disk partition. Any corruption of this one partition can result in the need to completely reformat the drive vice just one partition.W. Sieffert

HiWhen I started, other than FS taking forever to load, I wasn't having any hardware issues. I was experiencing what one person in one of the other forums characterized as a Nasty Direct X problem. I tried doing a reinstall/repair of XP but that didn't help the symptoms I was having so decided to go drastic and format the OS and then do a clean install. But the OS drive refused to format. That's when I decided to 'go nuclear'....At the moment, there's nothing installed. No partition, no drives, nothing. I too like to partition the drive for isolation of corruption. In the past, after installing the primary DOS partition with FDISK, it (FDISK) would show the entire drive available, some 120000 MB. From that primary DOS partition, I carve out about 5000 MB (5 GB) for the OS. This primary DOS partition eventually would get formatted to NTFS and is where Win XP is installed. The remainder, some 115000 MB I would assign as an extended DOS partition, and divide that extended partiton between logical drives...d:; e:; f:;...etcOne of which, BTW, is an FS Operating System where my FS9 engine sits.Well, except that this time, after assigning the primary DOS partition it shows 73000 MB available in lieu of 120000, some 60% of it's capacity. That's what I'm trying to recover.Or is it possible that the drive is hosed beyond recovery and I need to get another one.Thanks for the helpBobL

You probably already know this, but since going to WinXP I've never had to use fdisk. I just boot from the XP CD, choose new installation (or something like that), then I'm given various options to partition and format all detected drives. That may not work if something is amiss in your logical disk structure, but it's worth a try.

Another question just occurred to me. Where are you seeing the 73 Gb capacity displayed? Is it in the set-up screen during boot-up, or after you go into DOS? If the BIOS set-up screen shows the correct capacity, I would think that the drive itself is OK.

I couldn't get the WinXP CD to do what you said. I suppose it's because I have an upgrade copy of XP Pro rather than a full install.Your suggestion did cause me to explore the old restoration disk that I had from the OEM and I found a later version of both FDISK, FORMAT and SCANDISK. After utilizing those, here's the state of the drives...Much better but I still have questions...Physical Drive 1; Currently formatted for C: Reporting 112 GB out of 120.Physical Drive 2; Currently formatted for D: Reporting 71.5 GB out of 80.So, where's the missing space? I'm still short some 16 Gig!!!!!! Does it lose that much in just setting them up?????And to your question regarding the BIOS, yes the BIOS see's their full size.BobL

I think you're drives are OK, physically.First, having an upgrade copy of XP shouldn't matter. I also have an upgrade copy of XP Home. The only difference is, if you're installing to a drive without an existing copy of Windows, it will ask you to insert your qualifying version CD before continuing. You should still be able to partition and format. I've done it with my upgrade copy.Your drive capacities look OK to me. It might come down to the optimistic drive capacities that the HD marketing folks use. Keep in mind that 1 Gb is not 1,000 Mb, but 1024 Mb. That little fact lets the marketeers fudge numbers to no end. For example, my two physical HDs are almost identical to yours: 120 and 75 Gb (according to the drive manufacturers). Windows reports them as approximately 112 and 71.5 Gb, just due to the binary conversions and probably a little file overhead.

Here's a pretty good discussion of how the hard drive manufacturers fudge numbers to inflate drive capacities:http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm

This saga is continuing and no matter what I do, I can't seem to get this re-set...Here's the story...There are two physical internal disks, BIOS calls them ID0 and ID1.Disk 0 is partioned c: containing WinME; e: containing XP and f: for everything else. It is a 120 GB disk and I'm not having any issues with this.Disk 1 is an 80 GB disk, partioned (at the moment) for d: only. FDISK reports this disk as some 73000 MB. Windows ME sees this disk as a 71.5 GB hard drive that I can read/write to without issue. XP however, says it's a 33 GB hard drive. As soon as you start the XP disk manager, it pulls the partition out.Back to FDISK, put it back in. Format (using DOS because its convenient); Scandisk (Using DOS because the Windows version says there's nothing wrong with it but the DOS version says this is hosed up completely and it reports 33,000,000 bytes of old files no longer linked to anything.) I fix that. Back to Win ME and there it is, 71.5 GB. Start XP and the saga starts again.Does anyone have any ideas? Is this drive ready for the trash?BobL

Have you visited the Western Digital site to see if they have any troubleshooting utilities?W. Sieffert

Actually, yes. It's something called EZ-BIOS and it changes some of the motherboard CMOS. I didn't want to do that, so I moved windows to the other physical drive. Interesting thing is that regardless of where XP is sitting, it's not reading the full size of this drive but Win ME does.Right now, the WDC drive, sitting at ID0 is formatted c: with Win ME installed; e: with XP installed.The drive installed at ID1 is an IBM-DTLA-30375. That's the one presently presenting the issue. It's formatted to d: It's an 80 GB hard drive. FDISK says it's 73000 MB. Win ME says it's a 71.5 GB. I can read/write to it in ME. If you boot to XP, XP says it's a 33 GB drive. And I've tried a format d:/u on it as well. The format terminated after reaching 100% with a Directory Corrupted error message.I went to the IBM site and they aren't even in that business anymore it would seem. There's no support for that drive and their web search doesn't produce it. I can't tell if they have any disk utilities or not.Is it possible that the drive is hosed and neither the DOS boot disk nor WinME isn't smart enoungh to know it but XP is???BobL

Try the Hitachi site for info on the IBM.http://www.hitachigst.comKurt M

Wow, what a nightmare....I would believe FDISK before anything else (as crued as FDISK is); the values reported by CMOS with respect to drive capicity are no indication of the true functioning capacity; this info is derived from an eeprom on the drive & will report the same thing every time unless the eeprom is not functioning (in which case the drive shouldn't boot) as this would normally signal a chksum error OR there is an electrical interference along the IDE bus itself. Bottomline, if the drive reports to the BIOS, it will report the same thing every time (i.e. it's either there or it's not).... I wouldn't worry about the numbers FDISK is reporting (...FOR NOW), they're pretty close to that of WinME (~73000 to ~73216) which will suffice. How do you have this HDD formatted? FAT32 or NTFS ?? I'm a little befuddled so far....The problem at large is WinXP (it would seem); recall that regardless of which multiboot software you use, ***you should always install the older operating system before the newer***. I think some of this maybe being compounded by the fact you have an "upgrade" version of WinXP, but I don't know how everything ran beforehand.Run some diags from Hitachi, then do what you can to clean up Win ME, then revisit the issue.

Well,I'm back up and running now. It seems that the problem was a bad drive. I bought a new one and it (XP) found all the space. Now all I have to do is get all my apps re-installed. Thank goodness all my FS tweaks are backed up...BobL