160gb hard drive not giving full capacity

[shahan]

ok, thank you to everyone, but which advice should i take?

should i go with the binary vs. decimal / octal count and its under-reporting the size? or

flash the bios ? or

put in a pci controller card ?

[bistro]

1. If your mobo will not support over 80GB unless you flash the BIOS and the flash is available to increase that capacity, then use it. A PCI IDE controller may or may not work in this case.

2. IDE will be as slow as the primary device on it. Switch that hard drive and CD writer. Put the hard drive as the primary. Yes, it "worked" in the past, but you were getting slower performance than if they were switched. Legions of computer users in the past, leaning forward in the foxholes of power computing, firing electrons and lobbing memory addresses, have all learned that lesson of slaving hd's to optical drives. Follow them...learn from them. Let their example lead the way.

I wax poetic...

[dneilson]

I wax my car.

[Robert M]

Your motherboard and BIOS may not support a drive over 137 GB.

According to the numbers Broni posted, the BIOS should be reporting 149.01 GB.
Since it is not and reporting something less, this leads me to believe that the BIOS and/or motherboard does not support the ATA-6 specification needed for 48-bit sector addressing. My understanding is that ATA-6 also includes support for ATA-100 and ATA-133 bus speeds.

The other links that the others have posted have shown that the a BIOS upgrade is available for that motherboard but apparently NOT to make it ATA-6 compliant (48-bit sector addressing).

The fact that the motherboard specifications also report that the IDE channels are ultra DMA 33/66 leads me to believe that the motherboard does not support ATA 100 or ATA 133 operations and therefore cannot support ATA-6 transfer speeds and capacities.

If the motherboard or BIOS does not support ATA-6, the motherboard and/or existing BIOS cannot support drives over 137 GB.

Apparently, a BIOS upgrade is not available for your motherboard to make the upgrade to ATA-6. Not sure if a PCI add-in card would work, but since ATA-100 operations do not seem to be supported, if it did work at all, it may work at lesser speed than the full potential of the drive.

[SuperSparks]

In the first post the OP says that My Computer is reporting 149.1GB. In which case the full size of the drive is being seen. I obviously didn't explain myself very well, but:

160GB decimal = 149GB binary
149GB binary = 160GB decimal

Drive manufacturer's (and the International Standards Organisation) use the decimal measurement, programmers and (and Windows, Linux, etc.) use binary. So you always get a discrepancy on the reported size.

149GB in Windows is the full drive capacity, and you don't need to touch anything at all Shahan.

[shahan]

What is shown as the "Capacity" in "bytes" in XP's Windows Explorer? (Right-click the drive icon in "My Computer" and select "Properties").

For example:

I agree now that

160GB decimal = 149GB binary
149GB binary = 160GB decimal

The actual bytes being displayed before the total number of gigabytes is: (similar to the picture above) is

160,039,239,680 bytes

I have then worked out using the decimal vs. binary formula:

binary = 160 gb = 160,039,239,680 / 1,073,741,824 = 149.05xxx
decmial = 160 gb = 160,039,239,680 / 1,000,000,000 = 160.03xxx

It looks like the bios does not support anything bigger than 137.4gb but XP does. Although in the bios it says LBA support is on it doesnt say whether it is 48-bit or what. It also says 32 bit mode is off for IDE devices, its strange that the bios doesnt support bigger than 137.4gb but XP does. (I wonder what will happen if i bought a bigger hard drive in future)

In the bios the first hard drive reports as 80.0gb with
38309 cylinders, 16 heads, and 255 sectors

the second hard drive as: 20417 Mb (39560 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors)
the last hard drive as: 137.4 gb (4128 cylinders, 255 heads, 255 sectors)

i can now see if manufacturers define 1gb as 1,000,000,000 bytes then 160,039,239,680 bytes will look like 160 gb (they just take the 1st 3 digits in the bytes of 160,039,239,680 and around it off with the gb abbrv.

I have worked out the bytes for the other drives as follows as well:

80,015,491,072 bytes = 74.5gb d: (80gb)
80,023,715,840 bytes = 74.5gb c: (80gb)

if 1gb is actually defined as 1,073,741,824 than it is less than 1,000,000,000 and its showing 149.05gb than the manufacturers are wrong to define 1,000,000,000 as 1gb then the actual size is smaller?

[Train]

Forget the fight and just accept the fact there are two measurement systems in use.
The ad people use the larger number so they can sell more is all. And no, folks have tried to sue and have lost.
No hdd space is lost even if it looks like it has.

Add a ata 133 card and it can fool the on board bios into letting you add four more IDE devices just as long as each does not exceed 137,000,000 GB in size if they are hdds.

XP, make the C: partiton about 40 GB then install. Go into disk management and pick up the rest of the hdd.

Advantage being, should you have to do a reinstall to C:, nothing is touched of the rest of the drive.

[shahan]

ok.

so, just to confirm 160,039,239,680 bytes is 160gb ?

and is it possible that although the bios cant see anything bigger than 137.4gb but XP is able to?

or is it, if the bios couldn't see anything bigger than 137.4gb how can XP ?

[Train]

is it possible that although the bios cant see anything bigger than 137.4gb but XP is able to?

With SP1 as a minimum, then yes since that has the 48-bit in it, you can pick up the balance of the largest hdd made today in disk management. Why I posted this. XP, make the C: partiton about 40 GB then install. Go into disk management and pick up the rest of the hdd.


Some reading on diskmanagement.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm

48-bit LBA Technology
http://www.48bitlba.com/

[shahan]

XP was picking up the new hard drive as a volume of a RAID stripe set and instead of a basic disk it was thinking it was a dynamic disk to be used as part of RAID stripeset volume.

Disk management wasnt much help. I booted off a Windows 98 CD and fdisked it from good old DOS and that solved the problem. Now its not a dynamic disk, just a 'basic' disk and i can chop it into partitions. Only thing, i still cant format it as FAT32. The reason: i can see the data on all my other drives from DOS if XP got broken.

[shahan]

Why I posted this. XP, make the C: partiton about 40 GB then install. Go into disk management and pick up the rest of the hdd.

I am already using the 80gb hard drive for XP and some data (although its not partioned yet). The aim of getting the 160gb was to backup data from the 80gb.

[jdc2000]

FAT 32 formatting solutions:

Use a Windows 98 or Windows ME boot diskette

Or,

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...32format.shtml

[shahan]

I am getting some different results although 1 Gigabyte = 1073741824 Bytes:

http://webdeveloper.earthweb.com/rep...econverter.htm

http://measurementsconverter.com/byte_converter.html

google also says: 160 gigabytes = 171 798 691 840 bytes

[shahan]

I have found some information a bit more concrete but i guess the its all the same answer just the way they have written it:

It is always important to remember that the nominal capacity of a hard drive (160 GB in our case) isn’t the real capacity of the unit. This occurs because the hard drive manufacturers define 1 GB as being 1 billion of bytes (10^9) while in reality 1 GB represents 2^30 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes. All reviewed drives are in fact 149 GB units.

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/585

I didnt know this, quite interesting....nominal vs. real capacity... i call them cheats!

Also looking at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/585 it seems these hard drives are made in the far east and western digital in California http://www.wdc.com/en/company/contact.asp i think that could be why my existing 20gb WDC has been so reliable all these years whereas other drives like seagate, maxtor and samsung gave me problems, never trusted things made in the far east, always things made in UK or US but it seems theres loads of stuff everywhere from far east.

[SuperSparks]

Well that's what we've been saying all along, that there are two different definitions

But I don't look on it at all that hard drive maker's are cheating, the decimal, 1,000,000,000 byte, definition is the ISO standard. I don't see how anyone can be criticised for using an international standard. In reality it is programmers who are out of step here, and you should just look on it that Windows underreports the drive sizes. You'll find the same thing with memory sticks, SD cards, etc.