How do i partition a 160GB hard disk

Hi all and happy new year

Ive just borght a samsung 160gb OEM hard disk and im havivg difficulty setting it up/partitioning it.
The HD is unformatted unpartitioned. Im using fdisk 1.21 on a win98se boot disk. I Have to install win98se then use the 2kpro upgrade disk as these are the only versions of windows i have .

My problem is that when i try to partition the hard disk fdisk will only report at most 130gb of disk space avalerble. So i setup partition with the max avalerble space, i then format/s the disk ready to install win98se. How do i partition the disk using all 160 GB

The problem lies with your BIOS. I beleive your motherboard is using 32-bit logical block addressing, and with 32 bits the highest addressable space on a hard drive is ~128 GB, which may show up as 130. You need to update your BIOS to support 48 bit logical block addressing before it will report the entire disk.

This is most likely supported by the latest BIOS version available for your motherboard.

/edit
Microsoft's knowledge base article on this problem can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=327202
edit/

besides the 32 bit bios thing, which is most likely the first issue.......

first of all, all disk drives only use a protion of the available space no matter what. ie, i have an 80 gig, but it only uses 76.4 gigs and so on. the ratio is generally in the 90% as far as i know (although that percentage is only with maxtor and wetern digital for sure cause those are the only two i have used extensively) you can't make it all 160 gigs, but i am suprised that it's not finding it at like 152 or so, that is usually what it will say. second, didn't the hdd come with an install disk? i would run that... i know that i had a friend with a maxtor who wanted to use my western digital instal disk (it was a 40 gig hdd) and it thought it was only 1.8 gigs. usually if you use the disk that comes with it, that is your best bet.

The reason most HDs report less than the space advertised by the manufacturer is because hard drives are sold (most of them) under the assumption that 1Gb = 1000 Mb, 1Mb = 1000 Kb, and 1Kb = 1000 bytes. The operating system will calculate these numbers based on a factor of 1024. When reporting the size of a hard drive in gigabytes, this leads to a difference of 7 percent. (1000^3)/(1024^3)=0.931. A 160GB hard drive would most likely be reported by the operating system as 149Gb ( (160*1000^3) / 1024^3 = 149.01)

This will not account for the difference between 160Gb and 130Gb. 130Gb is close enough to the 32 bit LBA limitations of 128Gb to lead me to the conclusion that this is most likely the problem..

Hi scoundral...happy New Year to you.

You have bought an OEM product so I guess all you got was the drive in an antistatic bag...

Striek is correct in that there is "a barrier" at 128/137Gb.

I would normally send you to the Samsung website and tell you to get their installation utilities:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...ties/index.htm

Unfortunately they are a little behind, and the current utility will not go beyond this barrier. They do say that they are expecting to have the latest version by the end of December 2003, so they seem to be behind?

This really only leaves you two alternatives:

1. Update your MoBo BIOS, if this is possible and it supports higher than 32 bit addressing.
2. Wait for Samsung.

You might download the utility and check that it still is the older one.....wouldn't be the first time that something has changed and a webpage has not been updated? You might also e-mail their support people and ask when it is likely to be ready?

Good luck

Thanx for the replys will try to update me BIOS to support higher than 32Bit addressing