So I have this old OLD laptop I obtained about a week ago, appears to be from the Windows 98 era. Its a Toshiba Satellite 310CDT, with a 4x CD-Rom, 32MB of Ram, and originally a 2GB hard drive. Now I want to use this for some legacy gaming, mainly DOS, but when I installed the OS, I didn't realise it only detected and formatted 8GB of the 40GB hard drive I installed. I believe this is a BIOS limitation, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas as to how I could get the rest of the hard drive to be usable.

Thanks in advance

It mainly depends on the file system limitations, FAT can only go up to 2 GB, you should see if you can go FAT 32 on it.

It's an BIOS Limitation. The BIOS does not support Int 13h Extentions, meaning it can only use up to 16.5 million sectors, which at 512 bytes per sector yields a maximum of 8.46 GB. Maybe you could look for an BIOS upgrade?

Can't the sector size be increased in some configurations?

Believe it or not, I found an old tool in my archive that fixed it for me. It definitely was a BIOS limitation and there are no bios update for this model... But my good old Paragon Hard Drive Manager 6 for Windows 98 expanded the hard drive to 40GB. The downfall is that MS-DOS only see's 8GB... all well, if its too much of an issue I'll format the first 7GB for DOS and then the rest for Windows 98. Unless anyone else has any suggestions?

A drive overlay? That's probably what Paragon did.

Old computers had limited bios so definatley try the update as other people have said. Be careful it may see the space yet try save things to them and it ends up corrupt even if the partitioning software can see it because the bios can't so it won't know where to write data to.

@QuiescentWonder - Ah so that's the term for it! I used to use it to Drive Overlay my old 80GB on my system that could only see up to 64GB or something...

@win98 - I'll keep it in mind, thanks for the warning! Maybe I should load a bunch of big files onto it just to make sure, but I think it might be okay for Windows 98

I had the same problem with an old Latitude xpi cd... I have been able to format the partion correctly after booting on a live cd of damn small linux. Note that the first partition had to be 8gb or less.

You reached the limit. But one thing you might want to try is creating more partitions.