40GB HD reading only 2GB?

Hello!

I was wondering why my friends harddrive, which is suppose to be a 40 GB HD, is only being read as a 2GB. This happened when XP was uninstalled from it and then downgraded to 98SE.. but now its on 2000 prof. But, anyways, its a seagate HD and when he did the online test, it detected it as 40gb. Any idea why this is doing this? Please help us!

His hard drive was formatted as ntfs

He will need to erase everything and reformat as fat32 if he insists on using win98. He can still go and use the hard drive as-is (information intact) if he goes with win 2000 or XP. He can also plug the hard drive into a 2k, XP or recent OS Linux machine and read the files onto another hard drive (as backup) and then format the drive as Fat32 and return the files.

i bought a 15gb drive quite a while back and on win98 when you lokk at the the drive using drivespace, it sees it as 2gb and not used (when its nearlly full) wierd stuff happens...

FAT16 has a maximum capacity of 2 gigs or so. There should be something in Accessories to convert to FAT32. Presumably it went to FAT16 after formatting or something although generally a file system is only changed when it's actively converted by the user, it could be that it was droped to 16 when he reversed to 98...

XP will convert without reformatting to NTFS.

Originally posted by mouse
FAT16 has a maximum capacity of 2 gigs or so. There should be something in Accessories to convert to FAT32. Presumably it went to FAT16 after formatting or something although generally a file system is only changed when it's actively converted by the user, it could be that it was droped to 16 when he reversed to 98...


Yeah thats right, its probably cuz the partition is FAT16. You'll need to convert it to FAT32 or NTFS (since you say its running win2k) and then use a 3rd party program like PowerQuest's ParitionMagic to re-size the partition up to 40GBs. Otherwise you'll have to do what Bawy said and wipe the drive.