ComputerBB

i tried to format my secondary 20gb hard drive that had xp on it. my main hard drive has 98se so it didnt reconize the secondary. i went to the command prompt and typed format D: and it did but it says it only has 7.5mb but it really has 20gb. how can i fix this?? please post answer at email below [email protected]

when an operating system (OS) is installed on a hard drive, it does so in a DOS partition that has been allocated for that installation, in whatever file system that OS uses, Windows 98 uses Fat32 and XP uses NTSF. Windows 98 cannot format over an existing partition it doesnt even reconize. You must maually delete the XP partition using your Win 98 boot disk. A small "buffer" is left aside for DOS when a drive is formatted. The 7.5 M you see is that buffer; the rest of the drive is occupied by a Win XP partition.