I bought a Samsung 80 G-byte disk model SP0802N and tried to install
it using FDISK of the rescue disk of windows 98. FDISK reported only
10814 Mbytes of which 2047 were installed on the primary partition (C)
and 8767 Mbytes remaining for the extended partition. These were
divided into 5 logical drives E, F, G and H each containing 2048
Mbytes and I containing 577 Mbytes(D is the primary partition of the
slave drive)
My questions are:
1. where are the almost 70 Gbytes in excess of the 10814 Mbytes?
2. I have formatted C: Can I proceed installing windows 98 on it?
3. how can I find out how many cylinders, sides/cylinder and
sectors/side does the disk have?
Where can I get an Instruction Manual or other information on this
disk?  All that came with the disk is a box, 4 mounting screws, and a
3 by 3-inch piece of paper with information that only computer experts
can use.
I spent an hour struggling with the website www.samsunghdd.com and
related screens without results.

---

Clarification of Question by vaac-ga on 17 Oct 2004 21:46 PDT

Tanks very much for all your comments, but especialy to livioflores-ga
for comments and web sites
quoted. These helped me to dispell some of my ignorance although I am
far from  understanding the relationship between Bios & hard disks.

With your information and my knowledge of Interrupt 13 it becomes
necessary to change the items inquired by this qestion:

I am interested in having a disk with 10 or more partitions each being
about 2048 Mbytes and that the said disk be recognizable by my BIOS,
and that Symantec's Partition Magic will be be capable of installing
various operating systems, such as windows 95 and windows98 giving me
the option to start either one without having to open the computer and
change disks.

It seems to me that with my present BIOS this is unachievable. Is that true?

It seems to me that if I get a better BIOS and answer FDISK "Y" to the
question of "large hdd support" this is sill unachievable. It seems
therefore that I might just as well keep the BIOS and get a 10-Gbyte
disk. Is that true? Or is a 10 Gbytesdisk too large to be recognized
by my BIOS?

How does large hdd support work? Am I limited to one single large disk
without being able to partition it?

If I choose large hdd support, how do I get a better BIOS. Do I need
to buy a new motherboard or a new computer or can a better bios be
downloaded from the internet

From the following you should be able to tell what BIOS I have:
Turning on the computer gives "energy epa pollution protected,
American Megatrend, AmbiosC1996 American Megatrend
incorporated,Release10\251996S, Intel Celetron 500 Mhz, checking NVEM
16384kb

"del" gives "Ambios simple setup utility - version 1.20
C1998 American Megatrend, Inc All rights reserved.

"Standrd CMOS" setup" gives "Ambios Setup - standard CMOS setup
(C) Americam megatrends. Inc All rights reserved.

Hi!!

There are sveral things that can couse your problem:

·Ensure that you have the latest version of bios installed for your
motherboard. Many newer large drives are not recognized correctly with
older bios.

·Do FDISK, and make sure that you select "Large HDD support" =Y.
also once in FDISK, press 4 to see the drive's status, check here if
the drive is active.

·See this article:
"Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q263044

·Use the Samsung's DiskManager for the large drives:
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/index.htm

·See also this article:
"Size Limitations in NTFS and FAT File Systems"
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp


If this answer your question let me know in order to repost this in the answer box.

Regards.
livioflores-ga

Hi. I think Samsung's Disk Manager will be thwe solution you need,
mentioned in the previous post.

The problem you're describing is your system isn't setup to handle
drives larger then roughly 8-10 GB. It also sounds like the fdisk you
used was actually from Windows 95 which had a 2GB limit per partition.

Disk Manager is likely a branded version of Ontrack Disk Manager. All
the major disc manufacturers use a branded verion of Ontrack to
install a "disk overlay" which is like a fake BIOS that lets your
computer see the whole hard drive. It will also partition the drive
into one 80GB partition for you to then install Windows too.

Something else to note:

The hard drive manufacturers want to make the drives sound bigger then
they are, so they put a footnote on all their materials saying that
1GB=1 billion bytes, so 80GB drive is 80 billion bytes.

In reality, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes are calculated
in base-2, note base-10, numbering system. Which is also what
Microsoft continues to use for all of their operating systems.

Properly, it goes:
1 byte (8 bits)
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte.

So in DOS or Windows your "80GB" drive will always be shown as roughly
74.5GB which is the true size of the drive. Also, some of the capacity
(a tiny amount) will be used in formatting the drive.

-sparky4ca-ga

I think that the answer is the combination of the use of Samsung's
DiskManager and the use of an updated version of FDISK ("Fdisk Does
Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB").