120gb new hard drive trouble.....

Hello I have a dell dimension 3000 with 256mb ram, a 40gb hard drive, a 2.4 gig processor. I'm trying to put in 120gb hard drive. I have a dvd burner set as master, the new drive as slave on the same cable, then I have the older drive as just another master on a different cable. When I put the new one in windows only recognizes 31.5 gb of the 120gb its supposed to be. I upgraded my BIOS from the dell support website and it still does the same thing, any solutions???

 

That sounds rite for an old computer its all to do with the amount of heads on the drive. Some drives have a jumper to select the amount of heads and will be backwards compatible. If in bio's it still says the low amount then not much you can do. If bio does say the full amount then its your operating system and would say it window 98 or earlier and you should try partision magic to regain the missing 80 gigs.

 

Old mobo is one possibility. Judging by the computer you mentioned (Dell Dimension 3000) you should NOT have this problem.

Some hard drives have a jumper setting that specifically reduces the size. A 120Gb drive could be reduced to a 30Gb drive using this jumper setting. What you should do is recheck the jumpers and see if there is 1 or 2 jumpers on it. Look on the jumper map and post back what ALL options are.

Have you formatted the 120Gb drive? You first need to delete all partitions on the drive. Then format as NTFS for Windows.