Your disk might come with some documentation and maybe a CD/Boot disk for installing special software in order to use a large disk on old systems. Make sure you're following the instructions from the company. Some Maxtor hard drives need to be installed with EZ-BIOS or somesuch, which essentially helps older systems work with large drives. (In my cousin's case, it squeezed four or five extra gigs out of an (advertised) 40gb hard drive. (I mean that it was more like 38 gigs or so, but without the software, just normal BIOS, it was more like 32.)
