570e hard drive capacity limit?

Older ThinkPads.. from the 600, the 7xx, the iSeries, 300, 500, the Transnote and, of course, the 701
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JohnTGWalker
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570e hard drive capacity limit?

#1 Post by JohnTGWalker » Tue Aug 19, 2008 9:44 am

I am reviving a 570e which suffered from a dead hard drive. I picked up an inexpensive 120gb, and am using the original product recovery CD. I don't have any spare WinXP licenses around, so am sticking with the original Win2K it came with (and which is on the product recovery CD).

The install went fine (it's currently downloading various updates to Win2K), but I just noticed that the drive is only formatted for 63.9gb.

It's not a big deal - I'll never fill it anyway - but vaguely annoying. And I can't figure out why it would run into that capacity limit - perhaps something to do with the version of fdisk which the product recovery CD has? (The CD boots into a limited Win98 session.)

If there is a reasonably simple fix, I wouldn't mind re-installing to access the full capacity. But I'm not terribly tech savvy, so a simple install off the product recover CD is pretty appealing.

Suggestions are much appreciated!

John
X61 7673-CTO, Vista Ultimate

tom lightbody
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#2 Post by tom lightbody » Tue Aug 19, 2008 11:10 am

are you using "fat32" filesystem? I believe the limit is 64gb.
you could try using two partitions.
the way up and the way down are the same (heraclitus)

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#3 Post by carbon_unit » Tue Aug 19, 2008 11:50 am

Go into computer management/drive management and see if there is an unformatted partition. If so format it and use it as a "D" drive to store stuff on. If not then you found the drive size limit.
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JohnTGWalker
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#4 Post by JohnTGWalker » Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:00 pm

Many thanks for the responses.

It was indeed formatted as FAT32 - the product recovery CD reformats as part of the install process, and didn't give me any options for how to format.

But with that understanding, I was able to convert the volume to NTFS, then use an old copy of Partition Magic to resize the boot partition to the full size. Sorted!

Thanks again!
X61 7673-CTO, Vista Ultimate

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