On 12 Jul 99, at 22:14, Pam Pedersen wrote:

> I have a new computer (about 8 months old) with a 6.1 or 6.4 hard drive.
> The problem is that I can only access 1.9 gigs.  When it was put together, I
> think they asked me if I wanted it partitioned or whatever--and not knowing
> what they were talking about, I said yes.  Now I know that it split my
> drive--and I only have access to 1/3 of it.
>
> I bought the bigger drive to have the whole 6 gigs available without having
> to change drives...so now how do I change it back without having to remove
> everything and starting all over?  I have heard there is a way to do it but
> no one seems to know how.  Please help.

  I hope we can assume that this machine is running Windows98, right?

  When you double-click on "My Computer" [I usually rename this to the name
I've given to the machine, but that's not necessary if you only have one...],
how many hard drives do you see, and what are their sizes?  I'm expecting
that you'll probably see two more (D: and E:?), also about 2GB in size; you
might see a third additional drive (F:?) of about 500MB.

  Please confirm this back to the list before proceeding -- if you see
something different, your machine is not set up the way I expect!

  Win95B and Win98 support two different drive formats:  FAT16 and FAT32.
2GB is the maximum partition size for FAT16 (which you might have wanted to
use because it works with NT and Linux, etc, which don't know how to deal
with FAT32...), so I expect that's how the dealer set up the drive.
  In order to combine the whole drive into a single partition, you're going
to have to accomplish three things:

1.  Get rid of additional partitions on the drive.  If there are any files in
them you want to keep, save them first.  FDISK can delete partitions.

2.  Convert your primary partition to FAT32.  There's a utility to do this
included with Win98.

3.  Grow that primary partition to include the rest of the drive.  Oops --
Microsoft doesn't provide any tool to do this!

  Now you *could* back up everything from C:, delete that partition as well,
and use FDISK to create a new FAT32 partition that covers the whole drive
(when FDISK asks if you want support for large drives, say YES), and then
restore everything you backed up to this new partition.  That takes a fair
bit of planning, to make sure you have a bootable floppy with all of the
programs you need to do the job.
  Or you could invest in a utility like Partition Magic (I've used versions 2
and 3, and now use version 4), which can do all three of the steps outlined
above.


David G

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