just bought a 160 gig drive but when i put it in to format its coming up smaller, was going to put winxp on it but as soon as the disk had finished its setup it had the disk partition as 130gig i then put the drive as a 3rd drive and tried thru computer management but this time its showingas a 149gig hard drive is there any way i can get the full size formatted

 

Steve

Have you updated your motherboard bios, may help it read large disks.

B2Z

When a drive is formatted for windows (FAT16/32 NTFS) you lose a percentage of the storage, iirc my 80gb WD's went to 74.6gb


Si

 

Sounds about right. Its all marketing numbers. My '120Gb' drive only gives 111Gb real usable space. They work out 1Mb as being 1000Kb which of course it isn't.

[Edited by DJ Dunk - 1/13/2004 6:29:11 PM]

 

As said above all hard drives are sold on the idea that 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte and 1000 kilo bytes = 1mega byte and so on. So as you can imagine when you eventially reach the gigabyte part of the equation there is a noteable difference.

 

You need to check your BIOS/motherboard can deal with drives bigger than 137Gb. The standard LBA sector mapping does not work properly above this capacity. If you use a >137Gb drive on a system using standard LBA mode, you will loose data.

 

just formatted it to 149 gig before formatting it said it had 152gig but ive probably lost the rest to the recycle bin

 

Work on an estimate that whatever size the manufacturer quotes, you will actually get about 92% of that as actual available disk space.

Dave

 

@stevebt

may maxtor SATA drive was advertised as 160 gig. when formatted with NTFS i only got 152 gig or 163,913,347,020 bytes. that advertising for ya.

cheers

big sinky

 

Its not just that. The drives reserve a portion of their capacity for storing clean sectors (to replace bad sectors "on-the-fly" as they appear)

 

When I bought a 200 gig drive for my PC (running XP) for Xbox backups it wouldn't show any larger than 137 gigs.

Tried it in a Window2k machine and it was fine, with slightly less than 200 gigs avilable. I had to load XP service pack in the end, then it showed as a 200 gig drive. Not much help, if your trying to load XP on a 200 gig H/D for a fresh install

Phill

PS I found the information on Microsoft website

 

I'd consider running larger drives off a proper ATA133 PCI card.

 

Burr,

I did get an additional PCI IDE card, but didn't use it and re-installed XP on a smaller drive (120 gig), added SP 1a (i think) and it was the correct size, but as a slave. There is a fix for drive larger than 137 gigs on one of the service packs. Obviously you will need a autherised copy of XP Doesn't appear to be an issue with NT / WIN2K.

I think I'll add the PCI card now, as Xbox ISOs and MP3s are taking over my PC H/D space and I have a few more spare drives

Phill

 

there is a registry key change if you can't do the service pack for XP and 2000

 

Si,

I tried using the Reg key changer and it just wouldn't work mate. Had to re-install in the end

Phill

 

Be aware when using XP sp1, that HD > 137GB need a patch otherwise your disc gets corrupted!! I had to rebuild my pc 7 times before I found this patch!!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;331958

Regards,

Ian

 

That's the place I found it in the end thanks to Max Sti

Phill