Only 37GB on HDD after repair

I have a Biostar SFF socket 939 barebones PC running Suse 10.2. It has SATA controller problems, it will not run my SATA HDD. To get round this I put in an adaptor which plugs into the IDE socket to run the 160gb SATA hard drive from IDE. I find I now have only 37GB on the HDD to play with. How can I get the rest of my HDD space back again?

 

You will need to manually enter parameters into the bios to get the right cylinder/head translation. It will probably take a little experimentation.

 

Sorry. I am a newb at this, could you explain a bit further? I have no idea what a cylinder/head transition is, it sounds like something one would do one ones car engine.

 

Setup (the BIOS) presents the hard drive to the operating system as being one of several standard configurations.

You can see the current one by entering the bios and reading the info from the list of drives. This is usually on the first or second page.

The normal choice is auto, which means the bios allocated a scheme to the hard drive.

In circumstances like yours where you have an adapter making the drive appear as something different you will need to change to manual entry and experiment with the settings available.

All these settings are reversible and will not damage the data on the hard drive.
Some setttings will make it run very slowly.

You will need to post details of the bios, hard drive and adapter for us to be able to offer any advice on actual settings to enter.

I would have though that such an adapter should have come with some documentation explaining this.