I bought a seagate 300 GB hard drive yesterday. While installing the drive, I noticed the jumper setting on the drive...one of the jumper settings was to limit the drive to 32 GB.

I don't know if your drive has such setting...kinda strange why would I want to limit it to 32 GB if I bought it for the space.

Tux,

The cap limit of 32 GB is there so the system does not malfunction if a 300 GB hard drive is connected to the main controller on the motherboard. However, Linux has a way to un-cap the cap by including ide=stroke (I think) at the boot loader.

First, boot into runlevel 3 with knoppix by typing knoppix 3 at the boot prompt. Assuming /dev/hda is the drive you want to format, so run cfdisk /dev/hda. You should see the whole drive listed in megabytes or gigabytes. Next, make some partitions. The first partition have to be a primary partition. Then set the partition type to 83. Fifth, write the partition table and exit from cfdisk. Then run hdparm -z /dev/hda to re-scan the drive, so you do not have to reboot. Finally you can format the partition. Lets assume we want to format /dev/hda1, so the command will be mk2fs -j /dev/hda1.

The reason why I selected cfdisk is because it is more reliable, safer, and easier than fdisk even though it is a front-end to fdisk. It has a GUI interface that runs in the terminal.