Hard Drive not showing full capacity

thermg · 2 Mar 2006 at 22:05

Hi,

I have a samsung SP0812C SATA hard drive which is supposed to be 80 GB, Once formatted it is showing 66.7GB. I think that makes it about 71 ish GB before formatiing. Does anyone have any ideas where I appear to have lost the other 9GB? I am running XP with SP2. I also have a WD 80GB hard drive that is on IDE and is running at the correct capacity before and after formating (80Gb and 74.5 GB after).

Cheers

semi-pro waster · 3 Mar 2006 at 10:52

I make it you should have approx 76gb(80,000,000/1024/1024) before formatting so something has gone wrong here. Have you checked in Disk Management(Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Disk Management or something like that) to see if there is unformatted or unpartioned space?

thermg · 3 Mar 2006 at 20:46

semi-pro waster said:
I make it you should have approx 76gb(80,000,000/1024/1024) before formatting so something has gone wrong here. Have you checked in Disk Management(Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Disk Management or something like that) to see if there is unformatted or unpartioned space?

There is only 102MB unformatted. It is showing as 66.74GB in disk management for the whole disk (Unformatted and Formatted).

megatron · 4 Mar 2006 at 10:42

My new 250Gb is reported as 233Gb,

"
Please remember that depending on the particular utility used, the capacity of the hard drive can be reported in either decimal gigabytes, where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes or in binary gigabytes where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. FDISK reports a drive's capacity in binary gigabytes. A WD 80GB hard drive's capacity will be reported as approximately 75 binary gigabytes."

Ref. http://www.directron.com/faqwd.html#02

MikeOCUK · 4 Mar 2006 at 11:24

233 is correct for a 250gb drive, 66.7 is a little low for an 80gb, should be more like 76gb.

thermg · 4 Mar 2006 at 11:42

MikeOCUK said:
233 is correct for a 250gb drive, 66.7 is a little low for an 80gb, should be more like 76gb.

Exactly, which is what I can figure out. Its not like there are any jumpers or anything to change the value either. Oh well, I guess i'll just have to live with it, as it was a bargain at only £20! Guess I cant have my cake and eat it! LOL.

Cheers anyways guys.

megatron · 4 Mar 2006 at 12:08

Have u tried using a hard drive diagnostics tool? I believe its called powermax and runs from floppy (or cd-rw), u can do a few diagnostic routines but also there is a powerful format utility that can write zero's to every location on the hard drive. Typically takes a lot longer than a format.