Actually, chances are very good that this is an issue with the BIOS of the
computer in question.  First it was ~504MB, then 2GB, then around 4GB, now
the lastest is at 8GB.  Depending upon who made the BIOS, an upgrade may be
possible.

FAT has an inherent limit of about 2GB.  FAT32 is much, much larger,
something like 4TB, but don't quote me on that.  This has all the hallmarks
of a BIOS issue.  I know that my two Micron Pentium Pro 200's cannot see
drives larger than 8GB, so I'm not surprised to see this.

Incidentally, this raises another issue...in order to utilize a drive of
this size, you cannot use FAT16.  Since you can only have four partitions on
a given physical drive, and each partition is limited to about 2GB, there's
an obvious math problem here ;-)

In fact, Maxtor's 11GB drive that I recently saw at Costco for a
ridiculously low price states that it requires Windows 95 in order to
operate.  I suspect that what they really mean is that you need to use FAT32
in order to achieve maximum use of the drive.  Of course, NTFS, ext2, and
other 32 bit filesystems are also probably suitable to make maximum use of
the drive.

You're probably correct, Tim, about the utility software, but it's designed
to overcome the BIOS limitations rather than any difficulties with the
operating system.

Drew Dunn
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Check out the BurbCam!
http://adsl24.bois.uswest.net/drew/hood.html


>
> >I recently acquired a Quantum Bigfoot TX 12GB IDE drive, but
> have not been
> >able to get my GW2K Pentium-Pro 200 w/ win98 to see more than 8GB of it.
> >Any ideas? It seems to recognize the correct drive in the BIOS, but FDISK
> >shows the wrong size. I there a limit at 8GB somewhere?
>
>   If I remember correctly the FAT file system has a problem reading over
> 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, and 63 sectors. I believe this is the problem
> you are having. There should have been a utility diskette that came with
> the drive.  See if that works.
>