industrial pc failure

Hello friends,

my industrial PC doesn't

read over 504 MB of the C drive of any hard disk drive !. I've

replaced with many hard drives but the problem stay the same and so

that, no suffecient size to install the machine software!..

Also, i've partitioned and formated the hard drives with an external

PC and usually i set C drive to be 10 GB but when i connect it to the

machine and display the hard drive with FDISK in DOS, it shows only C

drive with 504 MB as shown in the attached image .

Note: The motherboard model is: PCI-12S-VER:E1
Help me to solve this problem please.

I am guessing the the PC is very old and has a BIOS that is limiting the Hard Drive size or the Operating System is.
More detail may help someone help you.

It could be a system partition you are seeing. How many partitions are on that disk?
That is interesting though.

try a low level format using DEBUG C800:5.
This option was available on older MFM drives with the controller onboard and I dont know if it still works or how old yours is so it might not apply.
I haven't done this for a long time so I had to look it up here

I notice the file system is FAT16, there is a known limit of 2GB pre-win2k. See the following for more.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940351.aspx

That is your issue 10Gb with a limit of 2Gb on FAT16. The computer doesn't know that it can't use all the space it just tries to create a table for it and faults because it doesn't know how to.
We ran into this backing up old controllers on memory cards. The controllers use FAT(8bit) to forma the cards, when we tried to put a 2Gb memory the backup would just hang up about 1/3 of the way through. In the case of hard drives you must partition the drive to match the FAT16 limitations, even if the computer "knew" to only try and format 2 of the 10 Gb it would still be 8Gb wasted.

you can make multiple partitions though, I would imagine that your computer would be able to handle 5 (logical) 2GB drives

Back when there was only DOS there was an upper limit of 528 MB maximum on the primary C drive. There was overhead for the drive that reduced the amount available to approximately 504MB. The only way for larger drives was thru multiple logical drives just as dlweber has pointed out. I vaguely remember you could go up to "Z" drive as a designator for a logical drive. My memory may be totally wrong though. Even earlier systems were limited to 32MB hard drives.

Have a look at this link:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Windows/Q_10097529.html

The situation seems identical to yours - it discusses using LBA when auto-detection the drive in BIOS.

A related and very excellent reference site:
http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/