Hard drive only showing up as 8gb?

Ok I just tried to install an 80gb western digital hd as a slave. My main hd is a WD 40 gb and it works just fine but need more space now. I have the jumpers on each set to master/slave accordingly but the slave shows only 8gb of space.

I'm running XP home with SP2, my motherboard is an Asus A7V600 Bios is a current as it gets. I checked the BIOS and it seems to be in order. Is there something I've missed?

 

Did you particion and formated the drive, or you just intalled it making WinXP do it for you.....?????

 

The hard drive came from my father who was trying to install it on an old mb that would only see it as 8gb without doing a BIOS update, it had already been formatted in ntfs. I did re format it with WinXPand it hasn't beem partitioned.

Is it possible it was formatted as an 8gb drive? If so how can I reformat back to it's original size?

 

What size does the Bios report?

Did you do a full format?

 

A hard drive has to have at least one partition set up on it before it can be formatted. You may find that it's been partitioned as a 8GB drive. Some machines impose that limit in the hardware; if so, FDISK would have seen only 8GB of the drive, and would have set up a partition for what it could see. Re-formatting won't change that.

Run FDISK (or other partitioning software, like Partition Magic) on that drive. Delete whatever partitions are on that drive, and set up a new partition (or partitions). Format whatever partition(s) you create for the filesystem of your choice, i.e., FAT32 or NTFS.

Do bear in mind that re-partitioning a drive will destroy whatever data is on that drive, so take extra care not to partition the wrong drive. (Pay close attention to volume labels!) Recovery is impossible without techniques and hardware that is very expensive to access -- if it can be done at all.

 

Thank you Rob, you hit the nail on the head. First thing I did was head over to the Drive Utilities here on Major Geeks downloaded Swiss Knife and erased the 8gb section. I then used Swiss Knife to make a Fat32 drive and I'm reformatting this drive in it's correct size in NTFS right now.

Thanks again, I had no idea an older machine could leave me with a headache.

 

Glad it worked for you, and thanks for letting us know. We all learn something that way.

And you're right about older machines. For some reason, I keep getting involved in those problems. Refurbishing older machines keeps me at the swap meets and my friends happy.