The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Problem with Setting Up a Large HDD Under Windows 98SE John McNabb |
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This will be of interest to those installing a large hard disk drive or adding a second hard drive. My choice was to build a Pentium 4, 1.7 GHz CPU, 512 MB DDR RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, CD burner and all the other bits and pieces one needs these days. There was nothing to it I thought. After all, I had already built up three computers from bits. Easy, I concluded; but there are traps for the unwary.
Assembling the computer was straightforward but when I started to partition the new hard drive with Windows 98SE, using the Microsoft startup floppy disk, it showed only 10 GB of hard drive. My first thought was the disk may have become corrupted and so I made a replacement using my old computer. Still the same. I checked the BIOS, and the new hard drive was correctly identified as an 80 GB unit. Now it was time to ring a friend, Fred, and explain my problem. With the advantages of cable Internet Fred was able to tell me that FDISK supplied with Win98SE supported only 64 GB. The good news was there was a upgrade on the Microsoft site under Q263044. Good, I thought, I fired up my good computer and downloaded the upgrade file (263044USA8.exe ), installed it on my good computer and then made another start-up disk. It still did not work on the new drive. It was then we realised that when I was making the new start-up disk, the system asked me to insert my Win98SE CD-ROM. This meant that it had copied the file FDISK.EXE from the CD to my new start-up disk. The date of that (older) file was 23-04-1999 10:22 pm.
Should you happen to endure the same experience and you download the upgraded file, go to your Windows folder, then to the command subfolder and find the file FDISK.EXE. For example, c:\windows\command\fdisk.exe. You must copy and paste FDISK.EXE to your new start-up floppy. When the computer says "file already exists, overwrite it?", answer "Yes".
If you check the file details on your new start-up disk it should read 18-05-2000 8:35am. And that is all you have to do to be able to partition and format a new hard drive that is larger than 64 GB with Win98 SE. Simple, was it not?
Keep your new start-up disk handy for when you install a second hard drive. You should take the
precaution to check your BIOS to see if it is able to read a large drive. If not, you might have to
flash upgrade the BIOS, but that is another story. This problem has been corrected on the later versions
of Windows.
Reprinted from the October 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
