I have a 2.3 gig hard drive and I recently wiped it b/c my previous version of Windows 98 SE was somehow missing tons of drivers and wouldnt allow me to connect to the internet. After reinstalling it says that my hard drive is only 503 MB now which as you know is nothing hardly. Any suggestions? Is there something I can do without having to erase and reinstall yet again? Thank you all! I knew you were practically the only place I could go for good help!

Please explain what method you used to "wipe" the hard drive. eg: reformat using format command, fdisk, other? Does your motherboard bios support large hard drives? Were you using disk overlay software because of bios limitations? We need a bit more info before we can help. :hdspin:

i used fdisk and I have no idea about my motherboard. This was an old computer I want to slowly fix up. someone else had said something about the bios but they werent very clear. But i had the same BIOS and it worked before. If someone could put the BIOS thing into easy terms for me I would appreciate it. I dont ever mess with BIOS except when switching boot sequence cause its so case sensitive. Thanks

Basically you have 2 choices:
1: Update bios (if available) to include support for large hard drives.
2: Use disk management software from the hd maker. Often called drive overlay software.

Did you format the drive after using fdisk (partitition software)? :)

Remember how IBM didn't think anybody could possibly need more than 640k RAM so they put all the system memory at the top! Well early BIOS programmers did something similar. They assumed that no hard disk would ever have more than 1024 cylinders. With 16 heads and 63 sectors that gives you just over 500 Mbytes. (Work it out: 1024 x 16 x 63 x 512 bytes.) Today's disks have many more cylinders but your old BIOS simply ignores them. If you can't get a BIOS update there is another possibility. Disk manufactures produced utilities to fool the BIOS by remapping the disk. This way a disk with 4096 cylinders and 63 sectors can look like one with 1024 cylinders and 252 sectors. These utilities live in the master boot record and are completely invisible to the operating system but not to programs like FDISK. One such utility is EZ-drive which is free from either Seagate or Western Digital (I forget which). I don't know whether it will work on other makes. If you can't find it send an e-mail to felix.ne14ap@btopenworld.com.

I forgot to add -- If you do use a remapping utility your existing data will be unreadable. No way round this; you'll have to start again.