Question about a WinME recovery disk

OK I tried to help a guy partition a new 160gb drive for his older 633mhz E-machines which is on ME. Since it has that slight problem reading over 127gb, he wanted it partitioned into a 10GB c:drive, 2 35GB partitions and the rest as another (approx 80). Created teh partitions with teh fdisk. Formatted them then tried to use the recovery disk to install ME into the c drive. Well it ERASED the partitions I made. Then tried redoing it with teh program that came with the drive. Same results.

Apparently Emachines recovery disk is made with Norton Ghost 9.0 (what the program said when it was doing it). I told him to get a regular version of ME and it will work the way he wanted. But no, he asked his cousin who claims all he needs is a ATA card to read over 127GB. SO he bought one. They installed it and guess what? Same results. Wont read over 127GB. Well now he's TICKED. TOld him 3 times that this recovery disk is the cause.

Anyone else ever had this happen?

I havn't had it happen to me, but always advise everyone to get the original OS disks when you buy a computer, and not any of them Manufacturer OEM disks, they're nothing but trouble.

You could try updating your BIOS to the newest version, it may have support for it.

However, the recovery disk was made to image the disk to a certain size. No matter what you do, it will recreate the partitions the way it likes them, and leave the rest as empty space.

If you got an ATA-133 controller, it should support the larger harddrive... anything smaller (like ATA-100) may not.

My suggestion would be to update your BIOS, and use a different OS... ME, besides being one of the worst operating systems on the plannet, is really old and crummy. A new copy of Win2k isn't that expensive anymore, or you can install a copy of linux for free.

Well unfortunately, he isnt computer literate and his wife doesnt want him spending money on a computer (she wears the pants in that family.). Only thing he has one for is ebay and he wants to save videos he took onto DVD's (another story to follow). His cousin was supposed to give him a copy of Win2K, but has yet to produce it.

As for the controller card being ata100 or 133, I dont know. I havent been there since the night I went over to help. He put the card in himself and used teh WD disk to partition the drives. Not like it was rocket science though.

Back to teh DVD thing. My friend who he works with told me he was eyeing a dual layer DVD burner. Mike told him to CHECK THE DRIVES REQUIREMENTS before buying it. Like I told Mike, this guys PC isnt gonna be able to use that drive or the DVD authoring programs he wants to use. The min req for the drive was 800mhz (he has a 633) and the software wants at least 1.2Ghz. Now he's talking about building a new computer, but doesnt know how to get teh wifes OK. I just say buy a new prebuilt one sicne all he is gonna do is ebay and burn home movies.

Although it is under the minimum requirements, it'll still burn DVDs... just really really slowly. Video editing will also be very slow.

He should just upgrade to XP...WinMe is the crappiest version of Windows ever made.

Well went over tonight to help some more. Put 98SE on it after we partitioned 10GB of teh drive for teh C drive. 98 loaded fine. But when I tried to install the 2000 upgrade disk, it stopped halfway through with a blue screen saying "cannot identify hard drive controller" or something. I told him to put the hard drive on teh motherboards ide controller plug. My guess is 2000 doesnt like to boot off a ATA controller card (another story why he has one). Are ATA cards a PITA when it comes to loading upgrades or booting teh pc off of them?

You probably just need to give it the ATA controller's driver disk (press F6 during the install loader).

su root said:

You probably just need to give it the ATA controller's driver disk (press F6 during the install loader).

Click to expand...

Wondered why it said F6. I never dealt with a controller card before much less with one used to boot teh pc. His cousin said he needed it to read over 137GB on older pc's wit 98 and Me even if you partition it. But I know a couple guys who have 200GB drives on their older 98 machines but have them partitioned into less than 80GB drives and have no problems accessing the whole drive.

Well, with win98, you use the FAT32 filesystem, which is limited to 32GB per partition... so if you create a whole bunch of 32GB partitions, it should work.. certain tools, like partition magic, or (sometimes?) WinXP allow you to format it larger, but that can cause problems.

Upgrading to Windows 2000 or XP will allow you to use the NTFS filesystem, and partition the harddrive as one big partition.

As for detecting the drive, if after upgrading the BIOS, the motherboard doesn't detect it correctly, then you'll need to use an ATA-133 controller card in order to see the entire drive correctly.