Missing GB from HD

hussey

we have a HDD in work thats 300Gb

when we open it in windows its says the size is 230ishGB

any odvious reasons for missing 70 GB??

Sleipnir

what OS?

hussey

sorry :

Win 98SE

P3, 800Mhz

Gaz

what sort of file structure is it ? Fat16, 32 , NTFS ?

Depending on the type you loose a certain amount , cant imagine it would be that much though.

Any RAID setup ? Hardware raid possibly ?

also check the overall size in Fdisk , maybe it just isnt fully partitioned.

Sleipnir

I'd tend to go with Darth on this one. It does depend on the file structure you're using and also the OS. It may also depend on the the BIOS version, some older BIOS's only recognize hard driver up to a certain size.
As Darth said, you do lose a certain amount after formatting, some is used to the FAT table etc. On my laptop, I have a 20gb hard drive but only 18.7 of that is useable.
Run an fdisk to find out whether it FAT 16 or 32, it won't be NTFS as Win98 wouldn't see it at all, and to see if there is any 'unpartitioned space'

maxheadroom

Also bear in mind that Hard disc vendors measure everything in decimal gigabytes, so 300GB = 300 X 1000 X 1000 X 1000 = 300000000000 bytes.

Windows calculates in binary, so 300000000000 % 1024 % 1024 %1024 = 279.4 GB. Unformatted.


On Win98SE, you're probably using FAT32. IIRC, FAT32 gets woefully inefficient once you get past about 80GB.

BUT, 230GB sounds familiar, , it might have something to do with 48 bit LBA addressing if you have an old chipset?

Virus_Inc

heh, as maxheadroom said, its just HDD marketing (as in 'lookout! don't step in the marketing!' making things sound bigger than they actually are... dunno about 70 tho

There was one notable exception though, I can't remember who it was, maybe Western Digital, but if you bought a 120Gb drive it was 120Gb formatted, no marketing.

Also, FAT32 gets woefully inefficient (compared to NTFS) when partitions are bigger than 500Mb.... FAT is good for floppy disks :P

dazberry

Originally posted by maxheadroom
BUT, 230GB sounds familiar, , it might have something to do with 48 bit LBA addressing if you have an old chipset?

That would have been my guess, but the limit was 137GB for 28bit addressing. 48bit is 144 petabytes. Could still be a BIOS / interface issue tho'?

D.