totally off topic but...

[reds4ever]

can anyone help? ive formatted my new 40GB hard drive under FAT 16 (don't ask!) which only recognizes drives up to 2GB. how do i get the remaining 38GB? ;O) (DOS 6.2/WIN 95)
big kisses to anyone who can help!!

[Scouse Gits]

You need a little program called fdisk.exe (might be .com, but I don't think so) which lives in Windows\Command in windows 98 I have a faint recollection that it is in Windows\dos under 95, but whichever case the find command will locate it for you.

Be warned this routine can destroy every trace of data from your computer - use very carefully

What fdisk does is to set up partitions on your hard drives - ech partiction functions as far as the OS is concerned as a separate hard drive. If you must have a FAT 16 drive it should be in a partition - not the whole drive for as you have discovered it only occupies a small fraction of the space.

I have told you enough to get the job done - if you know a bit about machines, if I haven't told you enough -- I strongly advise you to get professional assistance -- if this is not practical come back here and I shall try and talk you through the process - but do heed the warning above!!!

[Guest]

Get Partition Magic. It's absolutely wonderful program to handle partitions. You can create, delete, move, format, convert and resize the partitions in windows fashion. Then you 'commit changes' and the machine boots and makes the changes you have requested. If very easy to just convert that FAT16 to FAT32 with PM.

[SlowThinker]

Remember that DOS 6.2 and old versions of Win95 don't work with FAT32:
Of course, you may divide your 40GB disk into 20 partitions and use twenty 2GB logical disks .

quote: Originally posted by Scouse Gits If you must have a FAT 16 drive it should be in a partition - not the whole drive for as you have discovered it only occupies a small fraction of the space.

I didn't know that fdisk can place both FAT16 and FAT32 on one disk simultaneously...
[This message has been edited by SlowThinker (edited May 08, 2001).]

[catullus]

In fact, I would like to ask why you used FAT16.
Because, if you intended to use true MS-DOS or Win95 (pre OSR2), as SlowThinker says, you need a FAT16 partition. Else, you really should go FAT32 (or NTFS for NT/W2K).

Anyway, since the disk is brand new, no data written, best practice would be to start with repartition and reformat. Installation floppy will probably auto-launch fdisk, or you can start it from DOS prompt. I THINK that old (Win95 and before) versions of fdisk have troubles recognizing drives larger than 32GB, so use a boot floppy from NT4/win98 or later.
Delete old partitition, reboot, create new ones.

If you are going to use true DOS, make sure that primary partition is 2GB or less (do not enable large disk support), if not, make it a nice size. Like between 4 and 8 GB. Usually, you will be all right by making just one primary partition and one extended partition, the latter containing the rest of the disk. There are some problems with partitions larger than 8GB on some older PCs, in that case, check if you can upgrade BIOS. Then create logical drives within the extended partition. Logical drives less than 2GB may be accessed from DOS. If this is NOT going to be your boot disk, ie this is just an extra disk for your old PC, you would be better off by defining your whole drive as an extended partition containing logical drives and not make a primary partition.

Remember to mark the 1st primary partition active (will become boot drive) before finishing.

Reboot, start format and OS install.

C.