wrong hard drive format

Ok, here's the deal: A friend gave me a bunch of his old computer parts(i got 2 working pc's out of it) and one of the hard drives,western digital caviar 136aa{13.6GB} shows only 7.8 gb partition at 100% . I assume it was fdisk'd &/or formatted on an older machine that wouldn't recognize higher than that.What do I need to do to get it back to it's proper partition size? After 2 days messing with all these older parts, my brain hurts.

 

What size HD does your BIOS recognize it as? If it's recognizing it correctly, you should be able to enable LBA when you start Fdisk and resize it. Of course, you'll lose the data, but I'm assuming that's not a problem.

 

Tae; I agree with Brandon when it comes to Bios and possibly resizing; I'm a strong advocate of starting over, it's something I've done quite often throughout my life; But, I did think that you may benefit from another possible explanation and if you are willing to play for a while, you might find something interesting, though I don't know.

About a million years ago (Really, I think it was '93 or '94 based on where I was living at the time), I set-up a dual-boot system which gave me the option of running Linux or MS. Of course, this was long before multi-gig hard drives, but since then and long after I decided to start over; I remember reading in the press about a 1024 limit for dual-boot systems which simply means that the boots sector of both partitions must reside within the first 8g. This could explain your weird sizing, because I find it doubtful that someone would sacrifice 40% of their hard drive space. And for the note of others, fairly recently this 1024-limit appears to have been addressed...

It seemed to me, back when I experimented with the early Linux that I had to mount one or the other partitions from a floppy and some quick reading in an effort to get the url which I am attaching, reaffirmed that this was true and also, I had to create the Linux partition using the open source fdisk because the DOS product wouldn't do the job; Which is what I had in my head and why I did the quick research.

I kinda wonder based on your 100% reading, whether or not there is a Linux partition underneath and MS just doesn't see it.

If you want to play, you could do a google on "dual boot" or take a look at the following url, paying the most attention to the information about partitioning and booting, down towards the bottom of the index.

http://mirrors.kernel.org/LDP/HOWTO/Installation-HOWTO/

But again, if you aren't interested in seeing what is under there, I'm with Brandon and if the Bios sees it, simply start over...

Peace Out;
R

PS) Sorry I couldn't be more help; I have a photographic memory, but I'm also lazy as all get-out...

 

Thanks magister, but thats getting into more than i want to know right now!! As far as him "sacrificing" 40 % of space....he learned about puters from one of those through the mail courses, and so i have to constantly explain the right way to do things to him(after.He knows just enough to screw everything up, so NOW he is slowly learning!! Anyway,the bios saw an 84??(something,something,cant remember)lba, boot screen saw 84??something, not lba, windows saw 7.8 ,so i downloaded datalifeguard from w.d. site, reformatted and partitioned to 13 gig, but it tried to install its software during boot, ,so i took it off, but i now have a 13 gig non dos hard drive according to fdisk.So, i have moved forward, but will wait till the morrow to repartition to dos.