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80 Gig HD Giving me...30Gb?

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PlatypusMan
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05 Oct 2006, 3:50 pm

I've recently purchased a Westren Digital 80 interal hard drive, installed it using their installation utility as a slave, and it's only giving me about 33 gigs of it's total manufactured capacity. Wtf? I've got WinXp Service Pack 2, and checked to make sure the registry key dealing with large Hard Drive space is correct. My Master hard drive is a 100 gig (but adding the free space on my main hard disk to the recovery partition; it only equals about 93 gigs...wtf?). I went into the CMOS to have a look. It shows my master drive is 100 gigs (but why do I only have access to 93?) and it shows that my 80 gig hard drive is only 33 gigs? Is there anyway that I can make the damn BIOS read the disk correctly?

My computer is an eMachine W3107, the most recent model at time of purchase (spring of 2005).


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ljbouchard
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05 Oct 2006, 4:18 pm

Check the BIOS and verify that it is grabbing the information about the hard drive from the hard drive itself rather than being overridden.


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klassobanieras
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05 Oct 2006, 5:46 pm

The HDD manufacturers define a gigabyte as 1000*1000*1000, whereas everyone else defines a gigabyte as 1024*1024*1024. That's why your HDD says it's 100Gb but Windows can only see 93Gb.

100*(1000^3) ~= 93*(1024^3)


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aspergian_mutant
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05 Oct 2006, 8:37 pm

as for your 100 gig showing a few gigs less,
it may be just using a % for swap space, esp if its your main drive.

on your 80gb hard drive, check your jumpers on the hard drive its self.
you may have it running only on half cylinders.



alex
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05 Oct 2006, 8:46 pm

aspergian_mutant wrote:
as for your 100 gig showing a few gigs less,
it may be just using a % for swap space, esp if its your main drive.

on your 80gb hard drive, check your jumpers on the hard drive its self.
you may have it running only on half cylinders.


this is not true. a swap file would not change the overall capacity of the drive. klassobanieras provided an accurate explanation for that inconsistency.


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aspergian_mutant
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06 Oct 2006, 8:48 pm

alex wrote:
aspergian_mutant wrote:
as for your 100 gig showing a few gigs less,
it may be just using a % for swap space, esp if its your main drive.

on your 80gb hard drive, check your jumpers on the hard drive its self.
you may have it running only on half cylinders.


this is not true. a swap file would not change the overall capacity of the drive. klassobanieras provided an accurate explanation for that inconsistency.


ok granted, but on that 80 gig it may just be the jumper settings.



SteveK
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31 Oct 2006, 10:27 pm

Basically, as was said earlier:

!MB is figured in BINARY!! !! That means 1024 is the base value, because 1000 would leave a remainder. THAT is why you have 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,******1024*****! SO, !GB is 1072693248 and NOT 1000000000! That is simply due to digital arithmetic, and the reason why you can't buy a 500KB memory device.

100GB(STUPID DECIMAL multiple)=100000000000/(proper binary divisor)=93.223295836388074291300097751711! SO, they give you 93.

HOWEVER, M/S DOES have file systems supporting as little as 32MB! So THAT could be your problem.

ALSO, drives are STILL mapped to the old MFM/RLL standards, so you have to have the right number of tracks, blocks, and heads. If you said it had 100 tracks, 16 blocks, and 32 heads, your multiple would be 51200*512(standard block size)=26214400 or 26MB! You should make sure the numbers are right, or use the LBA(?) addressing.

Steve