Re: 4GB HD only reporting half capacity (2GB)
When you say you have tried deleting a partition, do you mean you
have tried deleting all partitions?
I did have a problem recently after installing on a drive with 6
partitions and plenty of unpartitioned space at the end. For some
reason the partitioner used during installation (I can't remember
if it was Debian or Ubuntu) decided to shrink the size of the
extended partition to the current total size of partitions within
it, preventing creation of any new partitions in the 200GB or so
of free space it used to contain :-/
I have also had drives of similar capacity to yours which came with
a jumper option to limit the drive size to 2GB as a workaround for
limitations in many of the operating systems of the time. Sometimes
this made it appear as two 2GB drives (master and slave).
Might be worth checking if there is any chance that the jumpers have
been touched since you last had it working at 4GB.
Failing that, I would probably try using dd to blow away all the
fdisk partitioning, and try partitioning again from scratch - just
in case the geometry information stored there is over-riding what
the hardware reports..
Regards,
DigbyT
On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 02:29:32PM -0500, Don Jackson wrote:
> This is not Debian or Linux specific, but I hope that some experts on
> this list can point me in the right direction.
>
> I have a Fujitsu MPA3043AT IDE hard disk that formerly had a capacity of
> about 4.3 GB. Hate to throw it away as it can still perform useful
> service in an older computer I have.
>
> In the BIOS, fdisk, etc., all are now reporting a capacity of 2.1 GB. I
> don't know what may have happened as the HD was tried in several
> machines over time, under various circumstances. Some attempt to
> install an OS on it may have hosed it.
>
> FDISK (under Win98), fdisk, cfdisk all report 2.1 GB. FAT32. Have
> tried deleting partition, etc. but is still reported as 2.1GB. All is
> well on that space -- formats under Win and Linux(etch).
>
> I understand that there is a 2 GB limitation if FAT16. But the size of
> 2.1GB is apparently stored somewhere on the disk. (Where?)
>
> It is presently being used in a Gateway E3400 Pentium III 800 MHz.
> machine. I find no way in the AMI BIOS to change the size -- only thing
> it does is "Auto". Other hard drives that I place in this machine
> report the correct information.
>
> Can anyone help by either giving me directions on how to recover the
> capacity of this drive .. or pointing me to where I might find this
> information.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Don
>
>
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--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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