Problems with Maxtor 80GB

Hi all, Had an interesting problem this last weekend I wanted to pbutt on.

I was working on one of my son's co-workers pc who tried to upgrade it himself with a new soundcard and cdrw... well to make a long story somewhat shorter it was fairly simple to reinstall the drivers... 10 minute fix. Then I saw his 80gb disk drive was only showing up as about 2.1GB ... hmmmm

I tried a rescue disk doing an fdisk that I created from a win98 system (he was running 98 as well) and could only get about 13GB max. I flashed the bios with the latest update (this was a soyo sy7vca-e) and made sure the mb would support an 80gb drive... no problem. I then booted the 98se distribution cd into command line mode and performed another fdisk... still showed up as only 13GB... I went to the maxtor website and downloaded their drive tools and wrote it to a cd. Booted that from the system I was working on, it recognized the drive as an 80gb drive and looked like it successfully configured it. During the process maxtor's program "maxblaster" asked that the 98 cd be put in to start the 98 install. It all looked like the normal 98 install up to and including the formatting of the drive... then during the process it got a format error. Tried twice with no luck. I had a spare 80gb drive and was about to put it in when I figured I'd give this drive one more chance. I ran fdisk again from the 98 cd and remove the parbreastions. Then I rebooted the cd and went into 98 setup. It formatted with no problem and when it was all done I had 80gb

I am at a loss... is there something I am missing here? Does fdisk on the 98cd have a size limitation? I have installed many drives and never had a problem like this before.

just thought I'd pbutt this along.

Dennis