..D.E wrote:
I recently got a Dell Latitude CP for nothing. I has a IBM DTCA 24090 hard
drive which is 4 GB. I noticed that the drive had been partitioned into 2, 2
GB partitions. I fdisked the drive and fdisk shows that 3.9 GB are
available. However, when I format the drive, only 2 GB is formatted. I ran
an utility on the drive called slate which will remove all partitions. It
successfully removed the 1st partition but can't remove the 2nd one. It
stated that there was a read error on it. Is it possible to use a utility to
remove all of the partitions (1 &2) and get the total 4 gb back? It looks
like the drive is fine. I was able to format and read the 2nd partition
before I fdisked the drive.

Also I would like to upgrade the drive to a larger one. The BIOS is A12. Max
size of new hard drive? Suggestions? Is still possible to get drives for
this laptop?

1) Hard drive limits are rarely published. Common ones: 8GB,
32GB,128GB, 137GB

2) If fdisk couldn't delete the partition because of a read error,
that's not good. Diagnose the hard drive with the manufacturer's tool.
Seatools from seagate will do in a pinch.

There are ways of nuking the drive regardless, though.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/


3) Yes. Secondhand.

You may run into issues with new hard drives, i would recommend a bios
update if you have to replace your hard drive with a new one.

Latest bios is a16

http://support.dell.com/support/down...6129&vercnt=12

a13
17. Fixed the issue in which the drive capacity for some large hard
disk drives would be incorrectly reported by the BIOS.

The run-me file it talks about is registry entries for win98 first
edition. it you're starting form scratch, you need not worry.