Format Hard drive to original capacity ?

Question

I recently formatted a hard drive that is 20 Gig and after the format it states that its capacity is now 2 Gig what do i have to do to it to get it back to its original size; I have reformatted it again with no success ?

Answer 1

Ahh the magic 2 gig, what are you formatting it with? If it's an old DOS formatter 2 gig was the maximum. There are programs on the net search for "BARTS" format utilities, or if you have an XP original disk, boot from the CD then format the HD, you should be fine.

Before you do all that though, make you you have not accidentally partitioned it, using the FDISK command from DOS remove all partitions from the drive then start over with partitioning under XP, some older OS's don't recognize over 2 gig. I would not reccomend FDISK since you can wipe out everything, but you are formatting so no danger of loosing anything.

Good luck

Answer 2

With some older computers, the system motherboard can only recognize 2 gigabytes. The hard drive manufacturers have programs to install an overlay to allow drives larger than this limit. If you require an overlay, use the CD that came with the drive or go to the manufacturers web site.

The partition is created in the FAT format. This old DOS style format has a 2 gigabyte limit. Delete the partition and re-create the partition using FAT32 or NTFS. NTFS is the best way to go but you need Windows NT, 2000, or XP to use it.

Answer 3

It is repartition you are after, not reformat, find Disk Management within Computer Management inside Control Panel, but you need to realize when to do it and when not to, it normally takes out existing data, but now many programs can do it without taking out the old data.

Answer 4

You probably have some partitions on there. You need some kind of software that deals with that stuff. You can then view the partitions and delete them to make one partition.

Answer 5

FAT16 can create a 2GB maximum partition size.