Hard drive does not give the real capacity, but much less

[nastyboy]

Hello

I had saved an old Fujitsu mpc3064AT hard drive (6.4 GB) and I wanted to use it for a silly thing. When I put it through USB (with an interface adapter) I found that it asked me to format and on top of that it only recognizes 2 GB instead of the original 6.4 GB. It works but only with 2 GB.

I have tried it with XP and Windows 7 and the result is the same. I have created a new partition and it only offers me 2 GB.
I have not seen any strange jumper, it only has the master-slave-cable select ones

What is happening to it?

Can I fix it somehow and get back 6.5 GB?

Thanks

[Fassou]

It is probably formatting you as FAT (16), so choose FAT32.

Bye!

[Sylver]

Hello

I'm not sure it could be a problem with the adapter you're using, I would recommend using the traditional IDE connection.

If you still don't get the full capacity, boot from CD with utilities like Hiren's Boot. Applications like Partition Magic, although they're not very useful, show you the full disks and might help you discover where the missing space is.

PD: Check if it's not what Fassou says too, that could be the case :rolleyes:

Regards

[nastyboy]

@Fassou:

Surely it is formatting you as FAT (16), so choose FAT32.

Cheers!

I'll check it out but by default I think it's normal NTFS
That IDE/SATA –> USB 'externalizer' has worked well for me so far, but I don't lose much by trying to connect it directly. But precisely because it's the first time this happens to me, I wrote to you. Moreover, when I rescued that HD from another computer I checked it with that same external cable.

It has passed TuneUp and it doesn't give me errors

thanks

[whoololon]

Adding to what Fassou and Sylver have stated, check that it has no hidden partitions.

[nastyboy]

@whoololon:

Adding to what Fassou and Sylver said, check that it doesn't have any hidden partitions.

No, it doesn't, I used the windows disk manager, and it only showed me one. On this win7 computer there is a hidden recovery partition on the main disk and it showed it
I'll check if I formatted it to FAT16, but I'm surprised because I think it offers NTFS by default

regards

[oscarbui]

Perhaps the disk is limited to 2 GB, some very old bios did not support some capacities even lower than the typical 32 GB.

Computer systems manufactured before October 1998 usually hang or freeze when performing automatic detection of large hard drives during system startup. The usual capacity limitations of BIOS are 528 MB, 2.1 GB, 8.4 GB and 32 GB.

Source Seagate