Hello, I hope someone can help. After a failed install of Win XP on a borderline system, I had to reinstall Win 98 on a back up drive to get the system to run. The system recognizes the 80 Gig hard drive that was the main drive of the system, but it is reading it as full and will not allow anything to save back to the drive even though it is only 1/4 full. The primary drive is a 15 gig drive that reformated when win 98 installed.

The info on the 80 gig drive can't be erased and the back up did not get everything. It can be accessed in the D drive position.

How can I get win 98 to use the full 80 gigs of the other drive without formating or partitioning it?

System info. Pentium 3 or 4, 1.4mhz, 128 Meg RDRam, Dell system. Original op system was ME and tried to upgrade to xp, but system crashed and would not fire up.

Any help is appreciated!!!!
thank you

run FDISK- say Yes to large disk suppopt-select option #5 to select the 80g hdd - now select option #4 to display and post the partition info.

right click on the D: drive icon and select properties- post used/free space and capacity.

Run scandisk on D: but DO NOT use autofix and can run the standard test , report what type of errors if any are displayed, if there are a lot of errors you can stop the scan.

Was the D: drive used by Win ME ? Did you try the XP install on it ?

Thanks Top, The D drive was the original C drive with ME as the primary op system. Tried to install XP Pro upgrade and it just froze after install. It would not fire up no matter what was done, safe mode, safe mode command prompt. Would start, freeze and restart. When auto restart disabled, just froze during boot up.

I installed XP on the 15 gig drive when it was installed on another system and it fired up and ran fine. I transfered the drive to the main machine and system Froze up again. Identical to other system.

I then did the win 98se install to get the system running. I tried to install on the 80 gig, but it wanted to reformat the drive and the info loss would be to much of a problem.

I'm guessing one of the components is not compatable with xp, and guessing it's the ram, but I don't have any other ram that could be substituted for it to try.

"I'm guessing one of the components is not compatable with xp, and guessing it's the ram"

The motherboard is the determining factor in RAM compatability. If it works under 98, it'll work under XP.

"I installed XP on the 15 gig drive when it was installed on another system and it fired up and ran fine. I transfered the drive to the main machine and system Froze up again. Identical to other system."

You can't install Win2000/XP on a drive in one system and transfer the hard disk to another system. The hardware information will be different and it won't start/run.

Given the facts thus far, I suggest downloading/burning a Ubuntu ISO image to get a bootable CD which will allow you to manipulate the files on both drives. It's a 714 MB file so you'll want to be on a fairly fast (internet) machine for the download.

http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/down...Start+Download

You should be able to get any pertinent/valuable files backed up to one of the drives (suggest Win98 - FAT32 so they're accessable with a 98 bootdisk if need be). Then you can stomp on the 80GB and set it up fresh with the file system-O/S of your choice.

Post back with your results.