I aquired a 160 gb pata drive the other day,

Bunged it in a caddy and it was only showing 7 gb, so I formatted it and now it shows 32gb.

There no jumpers connected too limit the drive size too 32gb.

Any ideas why it's having a mental ???

It was FOC so it isn't the end of the world if it's dead, jut wondered if anyone knows why.

Initial assumption: Using Windows.

Did you format it as NTFS or FAT32? The format tool has a 32gb limit under the latter system, unless you use a bootdisk and format it from DOS. Even older versions of FDISK couldn't read disk sizes above 64gb correctly, for which there was apatched cersion available from MS.

I just clicked "format" I didn't even look at the options as I'm so used to XP and NTFS, this drive came out of a Win98 machine so FAT32 would have been on there.

Would vista assume I wanted FAT32 if the drive was already configured that way ???

I think you may be onto soemthing !!!

Would vista assume I wanted FAT32 if the drive was already configured that way ???

I'd hope not but you know what MS are like with assumptions

I'd hope not but you know what MS are like with assumptions

And we all know what assumptions are !!!!

I'll take another look when I get home, this could turn out too be embarssing for me :(

I had exactly the same grief years ago with an early XP box because of a BIOS enforced cluster size limitation, took me the best part of a week to work out It only rang bells because of your original 7Gb estimate - I remembered that NT used to insist on a maximum of 7.8Gb for a boot partition under mixed file system disks.

Hope you crack it

Check the partitions

right click my computer, click manage and see if there are any other partitions on there or see if it sees all the other disk space

My uncle had a 120GB HD which would had issues and needed 2 partitions.

Another possibilty is the caddy, if its an old one it may not support large hard drives.

When the PC goes through POST, hit Del or whatever to get in the BIOS. Make sure the BIOS itself properly identifies the drive and reports the correct capacity. I don't think that's your issue - BIOS issues are generally around the lack of 48-bit LBA support which limits drives to 137GB, but if it ain't right in the BIOS, Windows doesn't stand much of a chance

Thanks fellas

I'm going too try and mount in a machine tonight and use the XP foormatting tools to see if it's the caddy playing around, although it beens fine with other drives recently. We shall see !!!