first you have to get it to see the whole 40....I htink yousaid it was a real old dell?
Might have to use one of those cheesy "bios overlay" programs. (whats the one called..ez-bios?)
ORRRRRRRRRR, get something like an ata 100 controller card...but I wouldnt put that money into that comp..plus it might not even work cuz new cards sometimes want pci 2.2 slots and you might not have those in that old of a comp.
Then, if that much works, and it sees the rest of the 40....you would probably have to take a shot at using partition magic to resize and enlarge the partition....unless you could simply fdisk and put another partition on there to fill out the other 32 gigs.
JP