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Fdisk not properly setting up my hard drives.

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Reply 20 of 20, by Dan386DX

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Hi, so it looks like you've figured out Victoria without my help but I'll leave this here in case anybody sees it in the future or breezes in from Google.

So Victoria doesn't make partitions, it changes the reported size of the drive completely. This can be really helpful in certain cases:

Last time I used it was when my 486 wouldn't recognise a 1GB drive (too big for era) even if partitioned into smaller logical drives. I used Victoria to convert it to 500MB. This isn't permanent and can be changed back.

*Disclaimer; use Victoria at own risk and be careful not to use it on your local drive by accident*

Anyway it's been a hot minute since I've used the softrware.

The order was something like...

Choose the drive in the right hand window > Click service tab > Device Configuration Overlay

Hit "get DCO" (or passport red button) first to read the current config and it'll show the full LBA count (e.g., a 1GB drive's ~2 million or so sectors).

Then In the "max address" or "HPA end LBA" field, enter your target sector count (for 500MB, roughly 1,000,000 LBAs - calculate as (desired MB * 2048) / 512). Confirm with "set max" or "apply HPA/DCO" you may need to run as administrator for it to work.

Use with caution, you can brick a drive with a misstep.

90s PC: IBM 6x86 120Mhz. 128MB/6GB. ATI Rage Pro 3D.
Boring modern PC: R9 3900X, RX 7800XT. 32GB/1TB.
Fixer upper project: NEC Powermate 486SX/25. 16MB/400MB.