How Did a 2.5 GB Hdd Become a 4 GB Hdd?

[CloudRanger99]

I recently installed a second IDE hdd on a old WIN98 machine. It's a 2.5 GB Samsung
(WU32543A). But FDISK and WIN98 see it as a 4 GB hdd.

In the beginning, I initiated Large Hdd Support to start the FDISK session. Switched over to the second drive. Deleted the previously created partition on it. Created an Extended Dos Partition and 1 Logical partition within this.

Funny thing was, FDISK said I had a 2496 MBytes Ext Dos partition and 4089 MBytes available to use to create a Logical partition within it. When I saw the FDISK line that read told me to type in the percentage or the amount in MBytes of the size of the Logical partition, I typed in the 4089 and got a 4 GB hdd out of the 2.5 GB hdd!

WIN98 sees it as a 4 GB D:. I was able to format it. It's now a FAT32 hdd. I am able to save and copy files to it and run EXE files off of it. Works just great!

However, coincidentally, the C: hdd is a 1.6 GB IDE. And if I add up the size of my first hdd, C: and the original factory size of the second hdd, D: at 2.5 GB, it comes out to very close to 4 GB (depending on how much an MByte is.) Hmmm

I haven't investigated this very much. Not so sure I want to fix it either! ; ) But still, I
wonder if it will come back to haunt me.

Can I reproduce this with all my future rollouts?
How did I do this anyway? What's going on?
I know that FAT32 gives you more drive space efficiency but c'mon.


CloudRanger99 is still building up this WIN98 machine for his mommy.

 

[CloudRanger99]

I went backinto FDISK and simply made the partition on the second Hdd a Primary and this resolved the issue of the 2.5 GB drive showing up as a 4 GB drive.

Not to look a gifthorse in the mouth, I do not plan to pursue this anymore. I am sure there is a basic arcitechtual reason creating a logocal drive on a second drive redefines the total drive size.

 

[stratagydk]

Good Morning
I have experienced a similar problem but in reverse: I work with Seagate ST91420AG drives (nominally 1441MB.

The auto-detect shows 1441 MB, but every other program including Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, and Fdisk sees it as a 503MB Drive.

This is a 2.5" Notebook Drive, Geometry 2794C, 16H, 63SEC.

Does anyone know how to do a low level format to bring this back to 1441 MB ?

 

[fasttoon]

Heres a possible solution,

I bought a samsung 10gb hard drive, had it installed, everthing said 10gb, later redid everything and lo and behold it was 13gb, I'm trying to figure this out called the shop and they had no idea, pulled open the computer and there is was 13gb written on the drive, called up the shop again and complained (shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth) and they said sometimes that happens when they run out of parts, they also gave me a faster processor during the upgrade for the same reason.

In any case Samsung may have mislabeled the case and you might have the balance of the hard drive as unformatted and when you fdisked the hard drive you used the previously unused space. As for stratagydk maybe its the same in reverse that there is unformatted space there.