12GB lost, where's it gone?

[Tone]

Just done a clean install of W98 on a Compaq Armada laptop. Machine has a 15G hard drive but 'My Computer' insist the size is only 2G. Run the Compaq diagnostics program and that reports 14G. Any clues as to how one could find (and use) the missing space?

Tone

[zoink]

the primary (bootable) partition of the disk may be set to 2Gb while the rest is left unpartitioned.

Have a look at fdisk (http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/) and use that through a dos boot disk to create a new drive which you can then use in windows

[ORAC]

You have run up against the FAT16 2Gb limit, see here.

Win98 does support FAT32, but, If your computer uses drive overlay software to enable large hard disk support, the drive overlay software must be installed before you install Windows 98. Check out the Compaq support site.

If not needed, or after installation, reinstall the Win98 and run FDISK. When asked "Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)?", select Y to format as FAT32. See here

[Tone]

Thanks for the swift replies, I'll install again & see if I can get it right this time.
Tone

[Conan the Librarian]

Just thinking about FAT32. If you need to reinstall the Op[erating system, why not reformat your disk in NTFS rather that FAT 32? It is much more stable than FAT32.

The two systems are not compatible, but NTFS is totally transparent and you will not notice any difference from an operating point of view.

I suggest that you Google it up a bit to see what the benefits are.


Conan

[Mac the Knife]

Errrr...Conan -- Win98 doesn't natively understand NTFS and AFAIK there is no easy way to implement this.

[Tone]

Managed to get it working at last. I needed to delete the original DOS partition, then set it again and finally reformat the whole drive. Thanks to all those who suggested fixes.
Tone

[Conan the Librarian]

Mac, I stand well and truly corrected... Must be brainfade due to Jetblast...

Apols for the duffer,

Conan