Computer Hope

Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: ohyea on December 31, 2006, 03:46:03 PM

Title: Maxtor Hard Drive Help
Post by: ohyea on December 31, 2006, 03:46:03 PM

So here's the deal: I would like to put an old hard drive that was given to me into my computer. So I wanted to test it out to make sure it didn't have any viruses and to see if it had been wiped clean or not. Well I hooked it up to an old computer of mine and I checked the hard drive space and was told that it had 2 partitions of 6 Gb each. I went ahead and loaded up fdisk on Win98, deleted all partitions and set up a new primary partition with max space and active. Then I reformatted the drive and loaded up windows and was told that I only have 7.8 Gb now. Well I looked on the cover of the hard drive and noticed that there should be 13.5 Gb so I'm basically missing a lot of space. If someone could please help me recover that space it'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Ohyea and here are the specs for the hard drive:

Maxtor Hard Drive
Model #: 91366U4
HDA: 04A
PCBA: 07A
Unique: 23A
Code: RA530JN0

Title: Re: Maxtor Hard Drive Help
Post by: Serrik on December 31, 2006, 03:59:22 PM

Is the hard drive showing at its proper size in your BIOS?

When you run FDISK did you say "Y" when it asked if you needed large disk support?

If you are running windows XP you could also just trying partitioning the drive within windows (I assume this is a 2nd drive in addition to whatever drive you have windows on)

To do that go to START->Control Panel->Admin Tools (may need to have it set to classic view to see admin tools)

Double click "Computer management" and click on "Disk management"

It will then display your hard drives installed.  NOTE:  Be sure you select the proper drive and do not delete patitions you want to keep!  Right click on the area of your maxtor that you want to use, delete that 7.8 GB partition you made and then right click it again to create a partition, then right click it again to format.

Title: Re: Maxtor Hard Drive Help
Post by: GX1_Man on December 31, 2006, 05:00:23 PM

Is sounds like the two partitions were not actually deleted from within fdisk or some other anomaly occurred. The drive may have problems as well. Maxtor has free diagnostics available on their web site to test it.