I recently decided to use my school hard drive for storage use. Anyhoo, it originally had four partitions on it with a boot menu. It is a maxtor 100 gig drive. I wanna make two partitions: one for movies, one for music. Anyway, i've tried everything but my computer only sees my drive as being 32 gigs. I have made partitions bigger than that, and my bios is up to date. even the software that came with the drive sees it as 32 gigs and i used fdisk /mbr to fix the mbr. What have i done wrong and how can i fix it? Please, i've annoyed all of my friends and i'm out of patience. Thanks to all who can help me!
Did a Google search and the first result was: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm Assuming you're running XP: Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q314463& Hope this helps.
Check the jumpers on the back of the drive, most IDE HDs bigger then 32GB have pins that limit them to that for the benefit of older motherboards that can't handle larger ones. XP's limit on FAT32 partition sizes doesent stop you from using the rest of the drive. As usuall, I must point out that anyone with an ounce of sense wouldent be using FAT32 for HD partitions in this day and age anyway.
I just ordered a new hard drive, and this thread might help me. what's the purpose of having partitions for just music/just movies? I'm getting mine just to back up my media.
If you're running Windows, you may be familiar with having to reinstall the OS occasionally. Having your personal files on a different partition reduces the chance of losing them when Windows goes down. You pretty much only have to worry about the physical drive asploding, but that probably won't happen for 3-5 years (or longer) with most manufacturers.
Well, RapidYak, you get the cookie. I took it out and checked all jumpers, and somehow it was set on a limit, which i have no clue as to why(not trying to cover my ass, i seriously have no clue, unless a guy in class was screwing around). Anyway, thank you all for your help and i did learn stuff along the way.
