Question about installing a 160GB HD

[jisoo23]

Hello all,

I just replaced my old 30GB hard drive to a new 160GB hard drive. I flashed the bios to enable recognition of larger drives (160GB detection verified on boot), used the hard drive manufacturer's dos boot disk to partition and format the drive (NTFS), then proceeded to re-install Windows 2000 Pro and SP4. I enabled 48-bit LBA support according to Microsoft's knowledgebase article (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098)

and now I see most of the hard drive. Here's the problem:

The hard drive is technically ~163.9 GB, but Win2k is only seeing about 152.32 GB of it (2.32GB occupied by Windows of course).

Which means there's around 11GB missing...does anyone know why or where it is? Previously Windows wouldn't see more than 131 GB, so 152.32 is definitely an improvement. But still, 11 GB is a hefty chuck to be missing. Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!
Jisoo23

 

[Aubs010]

I don't know if this is the best course of action, but it may give some insight:

Get a win98 boot disk and get into DOS, then (hopefully you'll have FDISK on the floppy) type FDISK and have a look at the partitions it shows are available. may show that only X% is being used...

I think I've used it before to check a disk partition

DON'T TAKE IT AS GOSPEL - I'LL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY PROBLEMS THAT IT CAUSES!!

Aubs

 

[jisoo23]

The partitioning software off the manufacturer's boot disk showed that it created a partition with 100% usage when I first ran it. I'll take another look when I get home from work. Thanks.

 

[euston]

Sounds like the drive has been advertised with it's unformatted capacity stated. The actual formatted (usable) capacity will be about what is being reported to you, i.e. 152GB. Sounds about right to me.

 

[bcastner]

The following say XP, but trust me on this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315688&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...efault.aspx?scid=kb;en-gb;316505&ln=en-gb

Finally, drive space math (from Broadbandreports.com):

Hard Drive manufacturers in general, define a gigabyte (abbreviated as GB) as 1 billion bytes (1,000,000,000 bytes).

Operating Systems and software utilities define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes, which is based on an earlier way of measuring hard drive capacity. This method measures a kilobyte as 1,024 bytes rather than 1,000.

In like manner a megabyte is reported as having 1,024 X 1,024 bytes (1,048,576 bytes) rather than 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte as having 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Therefore a drive with a capacity of 9.1GB (or 9,100,000,000 bytes) on the label will have 7.37% less capacity when expressed in Gigabytes, 4.86% less capacity when expressed in Megabytes, or 2.4% less capacity when expressed in Kilobytes. For example:

9,100,000,000 decimal bytes divided by 1.048576 equals 8,678.436+ binary Kilobytes, equivalent to 8.67 MB.

 

[jisoo23]

Well shoot, that makes sense.

160,000,000,000 / 1.048576 = 152,587,890,625

Which is about what Windows 2000 Pro is seeing. Hard drive manufacturers need to start advertising what's really in their drives, it's almost false advertisement =P Argh, that much worrying over nothing. Thanks bcastner!

 

[bcastner]

You are very welcome.

Best Holiday wishes.

Bill Castner