thinkpad 380z- 120 gig hard drive seen as 8 gig

[thinkpad adrian]

i bought a new 120 gig fujitso hard drive for my thinkpad 380z, wanted to load a double boot of 98se and xp. made a 50% partition and formated the drive with
the 98 start up disk, and installed 98, when finished, windows says the drive is 4 gigs. my old drive was 15 gigs, and worked fine. are thier limitations as to how large the 380z bios can see the drive? any ideas? i prefer not to use a disk manager utility,
it can cause other problems, and fujitso does not offer one free
(but they do offer a link to "ontrack" who will be happy to sell you one for $50.00!!) any help most apriciated. adrian

[virge]

I'm not that familiar with this issue, but maybe this article can help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... us;Q154997

The note at the bottom says: "Although the FAT32 file system supports hard disks up to 2 terabytes in size, some hard disks may not be able to contain bootable partitions that are larger than 7.8 GB because of limitations in your computer's basic input/output system (BIOS) INT13 interface. "

Looks like this limitation exists in a certain combination of drive hardware and BIOS. Maybe you're seeing 50% of the 7.8GB max for the bootable partition? I think an updated BIOS would help if you haven't already done that.

[thinkpad adrian]

i allready have the latest bios that ibm ever offered. the old drive was a toshiba 20 gig, and it is listed in windows as about 19 gigs, wich is about right (20 gig = 19 gig binary) i just wanted to know the largest drive anybody installed in a 380z, what the drive was, and did you need any boot managers to make it work. adrian

[kenk]

Several years ago, I wanted to upgrade the HDD on an iSeries Thinkpad so I could run Windows XP. I bought a 40 GB Fujitsu drive but the BIOS wouldn't recognize the size.

A friend told me about OnTrack, which I purchased and installed. It worked great, allowing me to use a single 40 GB partition. During the boot process, it overlays the BIOS image in memory so that the larger size HDD can be used. Here's the website with more info:

http://www.ontrack.com/fujitsu/

Hope this helps.

Ken

[thinkpad adrian]

i did get the drive to work, but i had to partition and format it
on a p-4 desktop computer (made 2 60 gig partitions). after re-installing it in laptop, i used a
98 start up disk and loaded 98se, i then loaded xp on the 2nd partition. performed a full scandisk with surface scan (took 8 hours),
and came back fine. will load 50 gigs worth of movies, and try to
play them. if that works, im home free. will keep you up to date. adrian