My computere isn't recognizing the full potential of my hdd what can i do? details?

Question

i recently had to replace my 40g hdd ( wich worked fine) for a 20g hdd i got from a friend, it came with 98 but now i got xp on it and all that but it says its only 8.7g hdd, i am told it is my bios that is the prob, but prev hdd worked fine.and not sure how to update bios i would like to know if i bought a new hdd formatted with xp would it work properly or would i still need to update bios?

i'm not sure friend reformatted for me, if he did how could i tell/fix the prob?

Answer 1

What brand and model is the HDD. There are some older HDDs that had a limiter jumper. Since some older BOIS would not recognize drives larger than those 8Gigs they capped them. Chances are that all you have to do is remove the CAP or Limiter jumper, which should be next to IDE cable connection.
Another thing is that a partition may not be activated yet. try looking into it.

Answer 2

reformatting and resinstalling XP will prompt you to choose the partition size..default is the entire capacity of the disc.
What brand of computer? I would flash the bios first before reinstalling.

Answer 3

You swaped out a 40gb for a 20gb? Are you crazy. Anyways mabye you never deleted Win98 and just installed another OS on top of it.

Answer 4

wow...what a query....i ponder whether all of us somewhat is living as much as their finished ability? Do you think of it somewhat is possible? i think of all of us have extra interior of us which would be pulled up & used that we never even found out we had or develop into able to making use of. I, for one, am fairly particular i'm no longer making use of all my ability, even although i attempt to. stable query!

Answer 5

did you refomat it in the ntfs format when you installed xp?