I have this Maxtor 80G HD but it is reading as a 30G. How would i change this to make it read the HD as an 80G?
thanks

I'm sure the problem is due to your motherboard's settings. You may just need to go into the setup menu. What board do you have?

I am not sure. I'm not home

Look closely when the computer boots (before the windows screen
popups) and check what size it says. If it says 30 GB your
bios either doesn't support it or is wrongly configured.

If it says 80 you may have some bigger problems...

Are you using a really old motherboard by any chance? Some of them may not support addressing for larger hard drives.

that would have to be one old mobo...

28bit LBA goes up to 137GB and most have been using 48 LBA for wuite a while

definately check the bios screen and info screen that pops up after that.

Where is it reading 80GB ? windows or bios or both?

is it attached to mobo ide or on PCI ide card? i have some IDE cards that read incorrectly when detecting OUTSIDE winXP, but XP sees entire drive fine. (notable this occurs in SIIG controllers, but not PROMISE)

mobo within last 3-4 years should have no issues auto detecting drive size. (again, only hooked onto mobo ide)

you wouldnt have happened to receive a "maxtor" ide card with this drive and have it hooked up through tthat? maxtor ide cards use siig chipset i believe

starnge problem this......

I also do not have Windows detecting the correct size of my drive, yet the mobo does on initial boot up.

There's a patch from microsoft that enables LBA but that also has not done the problem. It seems that 137GB is a max in windows for some reason with this particular problem.....

Any tech genius out there with any ideas?

Nick: your gonna at least have to tell us what Windows version
you are using.

When my computer boots (xp pro) i dont see anything come up except a black screen then blue. not info about any drives at all appear.

137 may be the max if you are using FAT32 format...

swap over to NTFS if that is the issue, or use disk management to partition the drive.

So, in windows....what does the drive size read at?

double click my computer, find that drive letter/name...right click it and go properties

is it only reading 30GB in windows?

also with BIOS...

if you get absolutly nothing except the winxp screen....

hit F2, ESC, DEL....these are the normal keys for gettin into most setups...

or try holding down some keys on the keyboard AS YOU TURN ON THE MACHINE. keep the keys depressed as this *should* trigger a keyboard failure/error...then enter bios (should say keyboard error..etc, press thsi key to enter setup or this key to continue)

insetup you can specify quick boot.normal boot, etc and alos disable/enable some things abour startup (such as the info screen that comes up AFTER initial BiOS screeen.

we can make this werk man!

;-)

Sorry.....

Of course I should have mentioned my op system...it's in the profile info, but I should have mentioned it's XP pro.....

NICK,

have you tried accessing the disk management util yet?

goto RUN put in "compmgmt.msc" (without quotations ofcourse)

click on disk managment on left pane, it will take a hot minute to access info

see what it reads volumes as. could just have been partitioned incorrectly or what not.

OR

your problem is that manufacturers list the drive size (i.e. 80GB)

but when broken down, it goes in units of 8 bits --> 1 Byte

its kinda like the screwed up system we use in the US for measuring. The metric idea is so much simpler since it moves in units of 10

My 200GBs will read in windows as 189GB (granted it save a small portion for file allocation tables) but i have two 80GB striped together, which in theory would be 160GB...but yet will list as 149GB.