About partitioning hard drives.

External Since: Oct 03, 2005 Posts: 20

A friend gave me an ancient Compaq Armada 1584 DMT laptop with a bad
hard drive. I replaced the hard drive with one that has a 40 gb capacity
and the computer's BIOS will only recognize about 8 gb of the total
capacity. In fact, it would only partition it as such.

I'm thinking that I can maybe put the drive in my desktop (I have a
working adapter) and wipe the drive. Then, if I partition the it say, to
have 5 or 6 partitions, would the laptop be able to see them all or even
use the hard drive?

TIA

--
John Corliss

External Since: Mar 12, 2007 Posts: 32

On 28 Jun, 11:44, John Corliss <jcorl....TakeThisOut@fake.invalid> wrote:
> A friend gave me an ancient Compaq Armada 1584 DMT laptop with a bad
> hard drive. I replaced the hard drive with one that has a 40 gb capacity
> and the computer's BIOS will only recognize about 8 gb of the total
> capacity.

does the BIOS tell you that?
'cos there can be an issue of the BIOS not recognising the capacity of
the drive.. But there's also an issue with fdisk sometimes having a
limit to the partition size it can create, like 137GB.

There's also an issue of, perhaps an early edition of win xp, or
perhaps all. Something like you can't partition or format a FAT32
partition , larger than 32GB. (you can resize it from windows, with
e.g. partition magic)

I'm just making you aware that there are problems similar to yours,
your problem is part of a family of problems! If you're a techie you
might want to know! It can help to a)know what the limit is 'cos e.g.
137GB is the standard fdisk issue. 32GB is the standard windows one.
e.t.c. You've done that. b)to narrow down / rule out what it is that
is making the limit. How early in the process it is. (BIOS , FDISK,
win xp)

> In fact, it would only partition it as such.
>

if it is the BIOS causing the limit, You can flash/upgrade the BIOS.
Though for such an old laptop maybe it still won't be up to date.

As somebody mentioned, perhaps meddling with HDD manufacturer's
software, downloadable from their site.

> I'm thinking that I can maybe put the drive in my desktop (I have a
> working adapter) and wipe the drive. Then, if I partition the it say, to
> have 5 or 6 partitions, would the laptop be able to see them all or even
> use the hard drive?
>

I don't know ''cos, I vaguely recall, my similar experience was of
BIOS not recogjnising a hard drive. The hard drive was 70GB, And
without flashing the BIOS, the hard drive wasn't recognised at all.