Recover space on IBM hard Disk

[MDA]

Hi all,

I have an IBM T-30 with a 20gb hard drive. The total size that shows is only 17.2. I assume that the remaining 2.8gb is being used by some hidden system files or something like that?

Is there any way to recover some of this space? Or is this standard with all hard drives? Excuse my ignorance, just looking to maximize what I have.

Thanks,

MDA

 

[shmoes]

Expect that to be a standard, your partition and format and so on take space. generally reducing your actual hd space when you've got nothing on it but the operating system it's misleading.

~Shmoes

I lay claim to nothing and everything. My words may be wisdom or disaster. In the end you make a choice. Noone is perfect.

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

Hdd companies round off the size of their hdd's to make things easier for the consumer. You would think that 1GB would be equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes, but it isn't.. 1GB actually has about 74 million more bytes to it.

You see 20GB on the box based on 1,000,000,000 bytes.. Windows sees the drive for what a GB actually is.

Murray

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

depending on your os boot to dos and run scandisk and allow it to fix your free space...granted 20gig is not going to show as 20 gig but 17.2 is a little low

 

[diogenes10]

is this one of those systems that has restore stuff in a separate hidden partition? and does fdisk show those kinds of things?

 

[wolluf]

You don't say where it shows as 17.2. Minimum 20Gb should show (based on a 1024 cubed gigabyte) is 18.6GB. Which leaves 1.4GB unaccounted for (is there a hidden recovery partition on the drive with this model?)

 

[MDA]

Thanks for all the feedback... I am not aware of any hidden partitions? There is a restore feature in WinXP but I don’t think that affects the total size of the HD I see. I don’t think fdisk in included in WinXp, so I cannot try that. Is there a way to view hidden partitions or other hidden info? Can you recommend a disk utility that breaks it all down?

Considering that format, and other system stuff uses up space I understand the low "total drive" reading. But I can't imagine that it needs 1.4GB as wolluf has calculated.

Mike

 

[comtec17]

If you are using NTFS this will show lower than the norm.

 

[wolluf]

If you're using XP, just look in its disk management for how the drive is partitioned and how much space is in each (run diskmgmt.msc). Also, as I said before - you never said where 17.2GB figure came from (eg, My computer, C: drive properties).

 

[MDA]

If I run an tool called PC doctor it breaks down the drive (below): The 17.3 shows when looking at the drive properties through my computer. I am not concerned about recovering the space, I was just curious as to why so much was not usable. Thanks for all the feedback.
--------------------------------------------------------

DRIVE 0:
Size 19535040 kB
Tracks 2584
Heads 240
Sectors 63

================================================
Partition 1
Partition Format 7 = NTFS, OS/2 HPFS, QNX, IFS
Bootable Yes
Recognized Yes
Rewrite No
Start 63 Sectors From Beginning Of Disk
Size 18136408 kB
================================================

Partition 2
Partition Format 28
Bootable No
Recognized Yes
Rewrite No
Start 36272880 Sectors From Beginning Of Disk
Size 1398600 kB
=================================================
It also says the following:
NOTE: The size of the logical drive does usually not match the size of the physical hard drive, because areas of the hard drive are used for management purposes, storing the partition table and other information. For the same reason the total sum of all partitions will be a little short of the total size of the hard disk drive.

NOTE: The number of tracks, heads and sectors shown here might be different than the actual physical parameters of the drive. This is due to a technique called "Drive Geometry Translation". Geometry Translation is used to make a drive with more than 1024 tracks appear to have less than 1024. The reason for using Geometry Translation is a built-in limitation in the PC-AT BIOS that prevents access to tracks numbered higher than 1023.
=======================================================

It is not really a problem, just was curious about the missing space..

Regards,

MDA

 

[Dreamland]

Well, there's your missing 1.4GB, MDA. The second partition listed is marked with a format that XP does not recognize and cannot 'read'.

It was most likely created when IBM was initially loading the O/S on that computer - they reserved the space for storing a hiden backup load. It probably has some version of windows preconfigured with your T-30's drivers. The data is normally not accessable unless you use some kind of recovery or reload disk/CD that IBM supplied with the computer. Even if you could get at it through XP, you would just see a bunch of compressed Windows and IBM driver files. Might be of interest if XP was the original O/S but you would still need the factory-supplied recovery disks to get any use out of it. There's sometimes an obscure key combination you can use during boot to initiate the process, but the recovery floppies/CDs are probably integral to the process.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about and have never seen these 'recovery' CDs, then the partition is quite useless (providing you have access to XP and the necessary T-30 drivers in case you do have to reload).