Hard Drive Help Pages
4. I have just installed a new hard drive
into my system but my system shows it to be much smaller than
the drive says it is what should I do?
There are two possible answers for this. The first is
that when you installed it you did not enter the bios (hit
delete key when you get the hit del to enter setup message)
and re-detect the drive to let the computer correctly identify
your drive. If you have done this then you will lose all data
on your drive as you will need to FDISK and Format it again
once you have the correct size detected.
The second answer is that when you try to detect
it you get the wrong size displayed. Unfortunately some motherboards
have a limit on the size of the drive that they will see.
This limit might be anything dependant on the age of the motherboard.
3 common size limits where motherboards stop are 540Mb, 2Gb,
8Gb. There may be something you can do about it though this
carries risks with it.
Dependant on your motherboard manufacturer
there may be a flash BIOS upgrade which upgrades the hard
disk controller to recognise larger hard drives. In order
to do this you will need to know the manufacturer of your
motherboard and visit their website to see if there is a bios
upgrade posted. If there is then they will also post the flash
upgrade program. However beware because in a small number
of cases the flash upgrade fails - see the motherboard help
for details of flash upgrades.
If your motherboard recognises the drive incorrectly
then all is not necessarily lost since the drive is likely
to run correctly at the recognised size. For example if you
have bought a 10Gb drive and your motherboard recognises it
as 8Gb then you could choose to use the drive as an 8Gb drive
and this will almost certainly work perfectly well.
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