Windows not recognizing all of a HDD?

Dud3!

My dad bought a stupid gateway/emachines A64 system and he was trying to hook up the 80GB Seagate Barracuda from my old system to get his files off of it.

The BIOS sees the drive as 80GB, a Linux boot CD sees all the partitions just fine, but Windows XP only sees it as a 28GB partition...

I know I don't have a lot of details, but can I get some suggestions here?

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:45:18 Post Subject:

Did you look in Window's Disk Management to see what it says?

Just in case... right click the "My Computer" icon, then "Manage", "Storage", "Disk Management(Local)".

I am doing this now on my laptop just to remember the steps... and I guess its the first time I looked at it. I have a 30GB drive that shows the C drive partition at 27.91GB... I then have an unallocated 31MB chunk sitting there... WTF

Dud3! · Posted: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:46:53 Post Subject:

I should have posted this in software...

Yeah, I had him go there, it just shows like the last partition on the drive which is around 28GB.

I might add that the partitions are Fat32, along with some Ext2/ReiserFS partitions at the end.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:57:19 Post Subject:

Not sure, being an A64 system, I assume its modern... Laughing

- but who knows what kind of guts these guys use. Could it be the old problem of big drives on older BIOSes that couldn't handle it?

In the BIOS... Is automatic drive detection enabled? Is LBA mode enabled?

Dud3! · Posted: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:58:36 Post Subject:

It's all on auto, including LBA. The drive that's in it is 80GB so that's not the problem.

The BIOS shows an 80GB drive, as does loonex, it's something wrong in windows.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:27:32 Post Subject:

Looks like it's the 2nd partion that's causing it issues. See if you can import it. If I recall you have to right click on the partion and choose something like "Import".

It MIGHT not work or be readable on that 2nd partion. BTW did you partion magic, or use some Linux disk manager on that disk?

Dud3! · Posted: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:26:53 Post Subject:

Made some Linux partitions with cfdisk. I thought of that today, I think I'm going to have him delete the Linux partitions with cfdisk, then use windows or partition magic to make a new partition out of the free space (so it will rewrite the partition table).

Keep those ideas coming though, that may not fix it.