What motherboard do you use?

I have tried this on both a Biostar M5SIB and a Gigabyte GA-5AX (Rev 4.1) and had the same results.

jtelep wrote on 2023-08-05, 17:43:

I have tried this on both a Biostar M5SIB and a Gigabyte GA-5AX (Rev 4.1) and had the same results.

To be honest, I have a gap in that age, although I have had a GA-5AX myself for a few years.
I know that they are in a time where BIOS limitations were a known thing. But I don't know where the particular limits of your current BIOS and board revisions are. They may likely be at 8, 32 or 128 (137) GB. I can't say more than you need to try.

Perhaps one is formatted as fat 16 and o e as fat 32

Try formatting it with a late version boot disk like win 98se or win me

Or even better boot pqmagic for dos

Or are you actually saying the bios thinks it is that small?

Btw, just because bios sees it as small doesn’t mean windows can’t use more of it once it boots. I have a computer with a 142gb hdd

Controller only sees 8gb, was only able to format about that much, but later I used pq magic to expand it to 128gb and windows can see and use all that once it boots

Right and I get that what perplexes me is why does an SD card to IDE adapter plugged into the same IDE port on the same motherboard show the entire size and show fdisk to format it as such? I would figure if it was a limitation in the BIOS that it would apply across the board and not just on SATA SSDs.

The startech adapter is the one you should probably be using. It has a marvel storage controller which is widely regarded as the "best". I have experience with that adapter and it has worked very well for me personally.

Few possibilities in order of likely hood:

1. User error. Check the jumpers on the adapter, the formatting and partition sizes on the hard drive, ect.
2. Drive incompatibility. It has been my experience that you can get different results with different SSD drives. I have had a lot of success with
Kingston A400 120GB drives., although my experience is with slot 1, socket 754 and socket 478 boards.
3. Controller incompatibility. The storage controller in the startech could be at fault. Solution is use a different adapter.

jtelep wrote on 2023-08-05, 19:19:

Right and I get that what perplexes me is why does an SD card to IDE adapter plugged into the same IDE port on the same motherboard show the entire size and show fdisk to format it as such? I would figure if it was a limitation in the BIOS that it would apply across the board and not just on SATA SSDs.

Do both SATA2IDE & SD2IDE use the same parameters in the bios ?
I assume the bios is set to auto, so it will autodetect on every boot.
Just go into the bios and detect the drive once and list that which the bios reports here for both adapters.

To get full size both should at least list as LBA. Not Large or CHS.

Yes and do NOT create the partition on the SSD under Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 or 11.

I figured it out (I think). Originally I had let DOS configure the drive so for whatever reason it only saw a 4.2GB drive of which it allowed me to use about 50% (which is right for a 2GB partition). However after that even when I deleted the partition using Win98SE from the boot floppy it still kept only seeing 4228 MB. Finally I had to connect it to a more modern motherboard that still had an IDE port, connect am old CD-ROM to it, boot from the CD to get to a command prompt and run fdisk from there. I deleted any partitions that were still there and let it detect the drive, when it came up this time it said 16014MB. After that I was able to put it back on the original system with the Biostar motherboard and now the BIOS saw the entire drive (even though I only created a partition that was 80% of the entire drive). Not sure what happened but thanks everyone for your help and suggestions 😊

You probably had the drive set to LARGE instead of LBA, and the DOS fdisk was made easy to use (although even that is debatable) but doesn't offer any advanced features. It will not show what geometry the HDD is using and what is stored into MBR, which leads to many problems when moving the HDD between CHS-only and LARGE or LBA capable systems.

Installing Win9x on partition bigger than int 13h limit of 8.4G is risky. It will boot if the necessary system files reside below that limit but once 32-bit HAL is loaded some program, like defrag, could move them beyond the limit and brick the OS. It's unlikely but not impossible.