hard drive capacity error

[Abrar Hazarika]

I have a Seagate UATA hard drive of 8GB. I didn't use it for last 6 months and now when i tried to use it, the fdisk command shows only 504 MB. Even when I deleted and tried creating new partitions it showed the same 504MB.

Is there any way to bring it back to its original capacity?

[Vincent Fleming]

What OS version are you running?

[Eugeny Brychkov]

As I remember there were problems with old bioses they did not support large disks. Please check if bios supports this disk. If not, find bios update (if available). Check how it's seen in bios. As Vince mentioned do not use DOS 3.30 or 5.0 fdisk. Take windows NT or 2000 setup disks. What drive is it?
Eugeny

[Abrar Hazarika]

The disk isn't loaded with any OS. I used a Win98 bootdisk to start the machine fitted with this drive, so as to load an OS.

[Marino Meloni_1]

Hi
UATA is a Ide hdd, if your 8 gb hdd is see as a 504 Mb, probably the cause is the controller itself, or the Boot disk you are using.
When you start Fdisk, it should ask you for enabling LBA that is the way to manage dig hd,
If the bios of your server or pc do not support this hdd, and is quite old, you need to upgrade it in order to manage thid Hdd.
Option, connect it on another pc and check if capacity is correct
marino

[Abrar Hazarika]

I got it right. yeah the bios was old and it didn't support large disks.

I used a new bios(machine) and it worked fine.

I connected the disk as slave to an existing win2000 system and tried from disk manager. The disk is identified ok as blank (unallocated space) but when i tried to partition, the create partition button was disabled.
Is this normal?
Any ideas about this?

Finally i connected it as master and used fdisk to complete my work.

Thanks again.