Hi folks,

Just had a dickens of a time trying to install a new (read that to mean DIFFERENT) harddrive into my Dell Dimension 4400 pc.

The drive I was installing was a MAXTOR 36147H8 60GB drive.

When I removed the existing Western Digital 12GB harddrive which had drive leter D: assigned to it and replace it with the MAXTOR 36147H8 hdd already formatted as 2047mb fat16 from being in another pc poorly misconfigured because I couldn't get it to recognise the full capacity of the drive either...well....

The old drive I took out was configured as a slave and I didn't use Western Digital's datalifeguard tools on it to format it (don't think it had the full capacity either but I digress)...Installed the new drive configured as slave . It was already formatted as Fat16 showing as 2047mb which it was reconised by and as on my windows XP Dell OEM version of windows XP Professional with Service pack 2 installed, 512mb of ram Pc100 and a 1.8gigaherts Pentium 4 processor.

Well everything was fine or so I thought coz it booted up okay but I wasn't happy with it only utilising 2047mb out of a possible 60 so I took some steps to fix that.

!) First I tried deleting the drive using Fdisk from an original windows 98 boot disk

Well that didn't work coz it could only read its size as being 32,248mb.

2)Tried letting windows format it by clicking on "disk management" however the size for the disk was set incorrectly as the 98 version of fdisk only allowed for half of the drive's capacity to be formatted.

At this point I was about ready to give up thinking that an extra 30 gigs was better than nothing...then I tried:

3) Letting windows disk management format it according to the reported incorrect capactiy using ntfs and after it finished doing that I determined I'd try one of the following:

A) Updated version of fdisk
B) Acronis Disk Manager
C) Partition Magic 8.0 or higher
D) Bios settings -->Didn't work
E) Possibly another disk setup utility like DataGuard Lifetools


4) Searched google and found this:

3rd google search using appropriate keywords relating either to the problem or my specific harddrive

From there I went here:

Homepage of my drive manufacturer, Maxtor

Then from the top right hand corner of the main page I entered in my harddrive id number and got this page:

Support page for my specific drive the Maxtor 36147H8 drive

From here I gathered my drive's official name was:

DiamondMax 30 VL Ultra ATA 100 (very helpful)

Then they had a lot of dropdown boxes underneath that leading to various fAQs and help files from which I learned this:

By clicking on TrobleShooting>Partitioning and Formatting I found this:

12 great guides to help with various problems relating to partitioning and formatting

From which I got the link that narrowed down my problem:

The Answer

It seems I needed this bit of info:

Quote Originally Posted by From_the_Guide
Installing a Secondary (Slave) Drive:
Note to users who do not want to format an old drive that will be used as a slave drive: To add a secondary drive from another system (old PC) without reformatting, the drive must have an existing FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS partition. The drive must also be jumpered as a slave drive. Add the drive to the system and Windows will detect the drive.

Insert the MaxBlast CD or Floppy and restart the system.


When MaxBlast asks if you would like to prepare the drive for use on your system, click no.


Select "Set up Your Hard Disk".


A list will appear with all the drives on the system. Click on the drive that needs to be formatted and click on "Next".


Choose the operating system on the Master "Boot" drive.


Choose “Install drive as additional storage”


Choose an installation method and follow the onscreen prompts. "Easy Installation" will create one large partition on the drive. "Advanced Installation" will give you the option to create more than one partition.


Proceed with the rest of the instructions.


Remove the floppy or CD when MaxBlast is finished. Restart the system.


The new drive is now ready for use.
Long story short I downloaded the

bootable cd of Maxblast 4

which comes as an iso file you burn using nero burning rom (or whatever u like) to a cd.


Then you set ur pc up to boot from the cd-rom and reboot the pc from the cd-rom at which point the software runs and I follwed the instructions above in quotes.

BTW a very nifty Linux operating system loaded (think it was Caldera) which launched the utility and it did recognise my drive at its correct capacity and formatted it according to the windows version i had.

After rebooting normall (after removing the cd-rom) windows said it detected something new and needed to reboot which I did and viola my full capacity drive was available to me.

Btw Things that did not work

1)old win98 boot disk with original fdisk
2)updated fdisk for win98
3)Bios settins
4)"disk management"

and finally

5)The windows version of Maxblast 4 which runs as an installed windows program. It only recognised what windows reported...you actually had to boot MaxBlast from the cd-rom under the linux operating system that launches it in order for it to set up ur drive correctly.

Additional Notes: aka things I didn't need to use but others might find interesting or helpful:

Quote Originally Posted by Drives_bigger_than_137GB
Note: After succesfully installing Windows, users who have drives larger than 137 GB will need to install the latest Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack from Microsoft and install the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler. Failure to install SP 1 for XP or SP 3 for 2000 and the Big Drive Enabler will cause data loss when accessing the drive beyond 137 GB