Help with Dos in Fdisk

I wasn't exactly sure where to post this, but I knew I could find valuable help here. I'm trying to partition a brand new hdd in a brand new system in msdos ( a boot disk) with fdisk, and it keeps showing up as much less space than it actually is. With the Dos 6.0 version it shows up as only 8 gbs, and with the win98 dos version it shows up as 40 gbs... well its a 250 gigabyte hdd. Before I go into dos bios detects my hdd at 250... its just once im in fdisk and everything it's not showing up correctly. Seeing that it shows up differently with each boot disk, i figure it's the boot disk... but can't figure out how to get it to work. I'm hoping this is somewhat of a common problem, and i can get some help. Anybody have any ideas... i know this is the cpu forum, but any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

IIRC under windows, FAT32 can't support any larger then 137GB, and I'm going to assume DOS uses FAT16 or just FAT, so it is only detecting 8GB.

I don't know what a solution would be since I don't really deal with DOS.

older versions of fdisk have drive limitations on size, you are running into size barriers and fdisk will not see any more than that. Are you going to install windows xp on it? If so, the setup will let you partition it to your liking. You can also plug the hard drive into a different computer and then partition it that way.

actually i'm going to be installing windows 2000. With my old computer, i know they used msdos to detect and partition my 80gb hdd. so maybe it's just the version im using and someone can direct me to a new version that works. thanks.. again

I believe the ultimate boot cd has some partitioning tools check it out at www.ultimatebootcd.com

just go ahead and run fdisk. true hd capacity will show up after you format the drive.

ive just encountered this when re-installing my OS.

should i only create one primary partition and then format it as c? Because if I create 2... then I suppose I'll have to format the other half of it as well, which will hopefully show up as d..

if you have a cd burner you could burn knoppix live cd and use that to partition your system for fat32 (I assume your using fat32 ?)

Does windows 2k not support ntfs?

Windows 2000 has the same partitioning tools that windows XP has, just boot from Windows 2000 CD and start the setup where it asks you for a drive to install Windows to, it will let you partition it. Create drive C: install windows, then create the rest of the partitions inside windows.

jamo said:

should i only create one primary partition and then format it as c? Because if I create 2... then I suppose I'll have to format the other half of it as well, which will hopefully show up as d..

Click to expand...

I would. It would take a shorter amount of time defragging the smaller drive.

This is why it's good to have a program like Partion Magic, or whatever it's called now-a-days.

bapski said:

just go ahead and run fdisk. true hd capacity will show up after you format the drive.

ive just encountered this when re-installing my OS.

Click to expand...

That's probably right. IIRC, there was a known issue w/ older versions of fdisk where on drives >64gb, the size would be displayed as 60gb less than it actually was.

Here it is.

yup partition and format the whole drive and do partitioning in windows...