Formatting new 250 Gb SATA drive with Fdisk shows disk size as 23396 Mb! only 10 % of drive. Any help?

FDISK is obsolete. It doesn't show anything above 64 GB correctly.

Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB

Don't bother trying the "fix" because you will only run into the 137 GB barrier!

What's the reason for using FDISK?

Christer

You would only use FDISK if you're going to format the drive as FAT-32.
That has never been a problem for me, because I use nothing But FAT-32 for all my drives, except Vista.

I just set the first partition (C: ) using FDISK, to about 30 gigs and format it in DOS.
Then I let FDISK set the remaining space as D:
(don't get hung up on the numbers)
No, it doesn't have enough digits to properly express the space on a large drive, but don't get hung up on that.  Just tell it to set the remaining space as the second partition.  Then run the DOS format on that partition.
Format won't properly express the size either when it starts.  Ignore that.
Just let it finish formatting the partition.  It will just keep formatting right out to the end of the drive.
I've done this many times, and the last time was on my 200gig SATA2, Maxtor drive.  It doesn't seem like it should work, but it does.
Use the FDISK and Format from Windows ME for the best results.
If you need a Windows ME boot disk and can't get one, drop me a PM.
I know where you can get one.

Good Luck,
Shadow  8-)

wrote on Jun 22^nd, 2008 at 12:27am:

Formatting new 250 Gb SATA drive with Fdisk shows disk size as 23396 Mb! only 10 % of drive. Any help?

Quote:

Note: FDISK has a problem displaying information for hard drives that exceed 100-GB. The extra character causes the size value to wrap to the next line. Once you realize what is happening, it's not difficult to interpret the data. But it can be confusing and takes a little extra care. The program still works fine, tho.

From the FDISK Guide.

There is a Gentleman who re-wrote the FDISK for '98 to fully display the size of LARGE drives.  He said he was going to do the same for ME, but he got busy elsewhere and now says he doesn't have the time to do it.

I think his post about it was on the MSFN forum.

If you use the method I outlined in an earlier post, you can virtually partition any size drive.  So far, a 200 gig drive is the largest I've partitioned with ME's FDISK, so I have no experience with a 500 gig drive, for instance.

But it sure can't hurt to try......

Cheers!
The Shadow  8-)

I'm still using the FDISK on my Windows ME Utilities disk, floppy or CD, to set up large HD's.

Ignore the numbers, just set your first partition to a reasonable size for your OS, and load your OS.
You can then use any partitioning software like "Partition Magic 8" to set up the second partition and even format it with your favorite format (FAT-32 or NTFS).  That's much quicker than doing it all in DOS.

If you want to set up the HD in NTFS, you can't do that with FDISK anyway, let the Windows Install program do it for you.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  8-)