Computer newbies: 160GB HDD when formated is 149GB....

i had the same question/problem a few days ago

by jonah jones  - 2/20/07 10:40 PM

it occurs to me that M'soft would score MAJOR brownie points if they used a system that would say "formatting your brand new 80G" and then "your 80G is formatted"


psychology i know, but it sure would feel good


jonah

.,

(NT) Thanks to everyone for their responsesI appreciate it. Bob

Again a frivilious Law Suit to make Lawers rich

I own 2 Western Digital HD's and have always known how they arive at the "advertised" capacity. It is kind of like buying gasoline and paying Two dolars and 59.9 cents a gallon. And to think that Western Digital settled this stupid suit. By the way I went to the link to get my free $30.00 Software (Ha Ha) and the time had expired claim that software. PEOPLE ARE SO GREEDY! What happend to good old fasioned common sense and being nice to others. I don't really think that WD tried to intentionally mislead the public. They just wanted to sell their product. WD is not the only HD manufacturer that uses this formula to show capacity. So who is next in this mad mad world of lawsuits? Please excuse my spelling and grammer I just got out of the hospital after 13 days in intensive care and 8 hours in regular care. It seams that once you are out of Intensive care you get the broom following you to get you out as soon as possible. Thank you again Greedy Attorneys. Without frivilious lawsuits we might even get decent health care. What goes around comes around. May God Bless us All!

larger hard drives

you are fortunate that it is reading over 127GB

the problem is the bios and the older bios have a limit of 127GB

you need to upgrade your bios with a newer version

first what motherboard do you have

at the first boot press the pause and brake button on the keyboard, this will pause the screen so that you can read and write down the information that is displayed

then press the enter button for machine to continue to boot

armed with the correct information go onto the motherboard web site and down load the bios into a file that you can easily find

transfer bios information onto a clean floppy disk (freshly formated) with no other information on the floppy disk

put the floppy disk fully in machine and reboot with disk in machine
and follow any instruction on screen

Let's make this easy...

Bob,

Original version of XP would only read to that 149GB or so barrier. If you don't have already, install SP2 on the machine. After that is done, right click on "my computer" and hit manage. Under Storage on the left, click on disk management. You should see the unallocated space in there. You can format that section and create a new drive letter for that previously unseen space on your harddrive.

clarification on 127GB limit

The 127GB issue is a limitation of older Windows disk utilities that use 16-bit programming. An updated versions of XP is a solution to this particular issue issue. The 127GB limit is not an issue of presenting the total number of bits on the hard drive in different units.

I'm surprised at all these wrong answers

The answer is pretty simple. Formatting itself requires the use of a certain percentage of the drive the raw bit data size is actually 160GB. In the case of my unformatted Seagate drives my unformatted 250GB was actually 250.25 GB, formatted it was about 227GB if I remember correctly.