two hard drives

i am running an amd 900mhz with xp pro
20gb hd..
30gb hd
i had a system crash one day pc wouldn't do anything,but i got it to boot up and take win 98 back on,that was on before xp,anyway i got 98 back on it,then i put xp pro back on it,now my 20gb hd says 2.0 gb hd.
the 30gb hd is right..please help what did i do or not do,like i should have do
ne..other than this it runs really well

 

first off, if you are doing a reformat on your main (20GB) drive, you shouldnt put windows 98 on their and then upgrade to XP.

doing this leaves you with a FAT32 file system, and even if you convert it to NTFS (the windows NT/XP file system) you will still have the FAT32 size clusters-- meaning a loss in performance.

if you dont have much on the 20GB... try reformatting using only your Windows XP disc. at windows setup, delete the partition on the 20GB drive (make sure you dont delete anything from the 30GB or you will lose data) and then have windows partition and format the full 20GB drive from scratch in NTFS.

 

what happened was after the crash,it wouldn't reboot with the xp pro,the only thing that let boot was the 98,but yes i did convert from fat32 to ntfs.i will try what you said,will this give me back the 20gbhd,i guess i should backup this drive..thank you for your help..

 

It looks to me like you didn't partition your 20Gb HDD correctly. I have a feeling you did not enable large disk support in fdisk. Meaning it is formatted using FAT16, which has a limit of ~2Gb per partition. I agree with InYearsToCome, install directly to Windows XP, this will also allow you to change the partition size. If you can't do this, then we need to fix that problem first.

 

the pc came with 98 and 1 hd,the guy that was doing the work,added the 2nd hd,put xp on,i think first go with xp.it was setup local c 30gb-local d 20 gb...cd-rw drive e.about a week or so it crashed,he said he couldn't get xp back on,so back with 98.week or so later xp back on..now it is local c 2gb
local e 30gb.. cd-rw drive d.
after reading reply from master sergent,i tried the reformat,no go,i don't know how but,i rebooted,then it was local c 30gb.. local d 2gb...cd-rw drive e.went to admin. tools the only option it would let have on the 2gb hd was to delete partition,now the only thing wrong is the 20gb drive is not showing up anywhere..please help,i'm getting a headache..thank you guys so much..bill

 

Check in bios settings (hit del/f1 on boot) and see if you can find any settings in there that relate to "large disk support". Do you know how the drives are configures? (do you have them both on the same channel, on different channels... is the 20GB one a master or a slave? It might make a difference)

 

thank you for your reply,as far as how they were configured,i don't know.as to the channel that they are on,don't know,but i'll go in to see if i can find this out..i'm a newbie at this part of the pc..again thank you

 

the pri master and pri slave are set to user,as far as the 20gb,set to master or slave,no info on it..should i set any of this to auto v user.thank you so much.Bill

 

Set them all to auto for the time being... this means it detects the drives on startup.