16oGB Hard drive showing 127Gb ?

robd831

I have recently installed a second hard drive of 160Gb, but it only shows 127Gb in the properties.I am using it as storage only,system in on C-drive
I am running Windows XP prof on a Fujutsi Siemens computer (4yrs old) which was on windows Me.

The original C drive is shown as a FAT32 file ! and the new drive is shown as a NTFS file system !

Can anyone help in how to find the missing 33Gb of drive and what is the differrence in the file system, is it safe to change them both to NTFS.

Thanks in advance Rob

Toxteth_OGrady

Ahh - the old 132GB max drive size!!

Either update your bios or update to SP2.

:cool:

TOG

student100

For a start, Windows will never report a "160 GB" drive as 160GB. That is because:

- disk manufacturers call a gigabyte 10^9 bytes (SI notation)
- software refers to a gigabyte as 2^30 bytes (since computers do everything in binary not powers of 10).

However, 10^9 is not the same as 2^30, although they're pretty similar (10^9 = 1 000 000 000, 2^30 = 1 073 741 824).

This means that in actual fact your 160 GB disk has a capacity of:
(160*10^9)/(2^30) = 149 GB
as far as software is concerned.



I'm not sure where the rest has gone though

NellyLock

Toxteth_OGrady wrote:

Ahh - the old 132GB max drive size!!

Either update your bios or update to SP2.

:cool:

TOG

...or partition it to 2 drives

-TangleFoot-

Toxteth_OGrady wrote:

Ahh - the old 132GB max drive size!!

Indeed; here's a handy site that explains the whole thing!

Toxteth_OGrady

NellyLock wrote:

...or partition it to 2 drives

AFAIK partioning won't work because the partioning app will only be able to split the 127 GB that the bios and OS are seeing.

:cool:

TOG

robd831

this is all very confusing, I get an error message in german when I try to update the bios via F-Siemens. All other sites I find via google want to charge for te update or link. there must be an easier (& cheaper) way

robd831

I have converted the file sytem to NTFS via the cmd prompt and as of now all is working well, although it seems to have emptied the zone alarm of all the programsd allowed acess to the internet.

charlieheard

student100 wrote:

This means that in actual fact your 160 GB disk has a capacity of:
(160*10^9)/(2^30) = 149 GB
as far as software is concerned.

I'm not sure where the rest has gone though

The space has gone in overheads to manage the space you have. Think of it like a filing cabinet. You can store vast amounts of paper in the cabinet in a big heap, but you wouldn't be able to find anything. So you need a filing system which takes up space, but allows you (hopefully:rolleyes: ) to find everything.

As for FAT vs FAT32 vs NTFS - unless you plan to use your PC with another operating system, NTFS is the way to go. FAT has been around for over 20 years, and was originally designed for use with DOS and unfeasibly large 30Mb drives. FAT32 tweaked the original , but still had many of the original's drawbacks. For today's >100Gb drives, FAT32 is hopeless. It's like Ford Cortina vs Ford Mondeo - both work, but which would you use daily?

robd831

Surely i can't have lost over 30 gb in overheads............!

student100

yeah, I have an 80 (decimal) GB disk (74.51 binary GB), which Windows XP Pro reports as having a capacity of 74.5 GB (NTFS) ... so the overheads really are minimal.

I expect the above posts regarding limits of disk sizes supported are more likely to be correct.