Since I'm not a teenager, I no longer know everything... I'm not a newbie to IT in general or Linux, but I've got a Western Digital 120 GB I've been using mainly as a data and backup drive on this machine. BIOS reports all drive parameters correctly, and I first installed this as a single-partition drive in Win98 with no problems, but then I used FIPS to put 2 more partitions on the drive without destroying my data (quite successfully). I was going to do a multi-boot system, but ran out of time (this was a few months ago); coming back to it recently, DOS fdisk now will not access these other partitions (which I since nuked with pfdisk) but that's not a real surprize. Pfdisk and cfdisk both misreport the size of this HDD now as 1.7 TB (I wish) and will not permit me to partition even if I manually enter the correct partition parameters, even a single partition, that would fit into 120 GB. I haven't tried parted yet, but I'm interested in the technical reason for this behavior. Any ideas?

is win 98 still working?

seems like a wierd one.... maybe partition table screw up...

The OS on this drive is a 3rd generation copy of a clone of my OS I was using with an old HP Celery box (from 1999); needless to say, it hasn't functioned properly for several years, but as I said, I have been using this for data, so a broken OS wasn't the issue; still no clue as to the reason for the size misreport...

I would suggest download some of the diagnostics tools off the Western Digital website and trying to run them.

if both utilites thought it was 1.7 GB i doubt trying parted or anything else for that matter will change it. It could be a table error in which case you probably have to rewrite the table by yourself. However i would also visit the manufactures website and download the utility that tell you if the harddrive is working properly. It would be good to know because you dont want to waste your time working with a faulty drive