Hard Drive: wrong size/delete error

[stormswift]

I have a new pc  As i have a couple at home have agreed to allow my son to use any bits that will increase the size etc of the one he uses with my old pc.
Having said this he has duly snapped up the HDD a newish 80gig maxtor to add to the 20 gig on his.
This is where the problems have arisen from. As i had the drive partitioned into 3 sections he has tried to delete them and reformat using fdisk etc on a win 98 startup disk.

Right problems: in fdisk there is only a total of about 12 gig being seen? I have also now connected it as a slave to an existing pc using xp to see if that can see the whole drive. Doing this the machine doesn't recognise the drive at all. Once xp boots it finds new hardware, recognises the drive but only shows the last original partition data intact.

I have found a small freeware that claims to restore HDD's to factory settings. I have loaded this ran it and that reports the full size correctly but then says doesn't need restoring 

How can I get the drive back to full capacity. All data on there origanlly has already been backedup as needed so even a way to completely format the whole drive anything that will restore it to be seen and as such be able to replace his small HDD

Any help wouldbe appreciated as I'm struggling to think of what to search for now on google

[BC_Programmer]

Don't worry- this is a problem with the Windows 98 version of FDISK. I believe that disks over a certain size would subtract 64GB from the actual total. (that would be 16, but we're forgettting about the fact that an 80GB drive is not quite 80GB)

I believe Microsoft has document this problem and released a fix.

good thing I read the MSKB when I'm bored. here is the knowledge base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044

good luck to you.

[patio]

Travel to bootdisk.com and grab a WinME bootdisk...this should work fine.
Or you could grab the diagnostics from the drive manuf. site....FREE.