IT beginner

[smitty74]

I have a HP vectra vl420mt I picked up because it was password locked, and the previous owner didn't want to hassle with its repair.  I removed the hard drive to check the size and found that it was an 80GB.  I partitioned the drive with the fdisk command on the MS-DOS OS and it would only let me partition 10,400 some odd MB.  It allotted 3% for the active partition and 6% for the extended and logic partitions.  where did the other 71,000 MB go.  Is this a sign of a defective hard drive.

[Geek-9pm]

No. Why did you have to format the drive? Have you read the manual? You can not format the whole drive because it is locked.
Best thing to do is contact HP and/or go to the web site. If you have the serial number, they will give you help with the machine.

[smitty74]

I should have said that I was able to unlock the machine by resetting a switch inside and shutting down.  I was locked out of the BIOS setup. 


Do you have pets?[/b] 4 cats