I'm WinDumb and I admit it!

[ShadesOfGrey]

JaXanim wrote:
@All

Panic over! My 80Gb drive is now installed and fully functional. Thanks to the links offered by Waccoon, I've managed to FAT32 format the full capacity (albeit in a 1Gb and a 79Gb partitions). Don't know why this was necessary, but I'm not complaining about that.

IIRC, (as I haven't used M$ FDISK in quite some time) you aren't limited to 1GB for the first parition.  But you are warned to keep any bootable partition(s) before the first gigabyte of the drive.  This is a 'limitation' of the M$ boot loader...  I believe the Amiga/OS also has a similar 'limit'.  Anyway, you should be able to resize/merge your partitions using the commercial Partition Magic or Partition Commander, or the freeware/opensource tools like FIPS.  You might consider looking into the Ultimate Boot CD.  It's pretty handy for doing things like partitioning a drive (it includes several freeware/demo disk tools, benchmarks, system info and even boot-managers) or flashing the BIOS on a PC.

[Waccoon]

This is a 'limitation' of the M$ boot loader

It's a limitation of the PC BIOS.  The PC architecture has changed massively over the last decade, but the PC BIOS is still written around assembly language and hardware offsets for some stupid reason.

A boot loading partition is only really needed if you multiboot the machine.

I'm glad those programs worked!  I myself use Partition Magic, but then, I fix a lot of computers and need the more powerful commercial tools, including those that support OS/2.