80 GIG Maxtor drive showing 76 GIG

[Nocturnecsh]

I installed an 80 GIG Maxtor drive as a SPARE drive in my
Windows XP machine. I'm writing this email from work, so I
don't have the specs for it. I'm not sure what type of
Maxtor drive it is. The only partition showing was the
boot partition (approx. 650 MB). I had tried to install
the drive in an older PC that showed only 32 GIGs
available, so I have installed it in a new Emachine.
Under "Computer Management" in XP I deleted the 650 MB
partition and then tried to make the drive go back to 80
GIG. Now the drive only shows approx. 76 GIGs at 100%
available. How do I reformat the drive to make it one 80
GIG drive again? Since this is not going to be the boot
drive I do not want to partition any smaller groupings.

 

[Nicholas]

Disk manufacturer gigabytes are: 1,000,000,000.
Real gigabytes as recognized by Windows are: 1,073,741,824.

80,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 74.5 real gigabytes on your 80gig disk.


--
Nicholas

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


| I installed an 80 GIG Maxtor drive as a SPARE drive in my
| Windows XP machine. I'm writing this email from work, so I
| don't have the specs for it. I'm not sure what type of
| Maxtor drive it is. The only partition showing was the
| boot partition (approx. 650 MB). I had tried to install
| the drive in an older PC that showed only 32 GIGs
| available, so I have installed it in a new Emachine.
| Under "Computer Management" in XP I deleted the 650 MB
| partition and then tried to make the drive go back to 80
| GIG. Now the drive only shows approx. 76 GIGs at 100%
| available. How do I reformat the drive to make it one 80
| GIG drive again? Since this is not going to be the boot
| drive I do not want to partition any smaller groupings.

 

[Pete Baker]

Hi Nocturnecsh

You are not missing any space with 76 Gb (?), although the drive
manufacturer could be
clearer.

In XP, open My Computer, select the appropriate drive and right-click,
select properties... beside 'capacity'
you will see the total number of bytes on your disk and to the right the
number of Gigabytes.

For example, on my 40 Gb 'data' disk I have 40,007,729,152 bytes... which is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 37.2 Gb.

The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as
40 Gb... and, in
purely decimal terms, it is - 40,000,000,000 bytes.

The 37.2 Gb is what the computer 'sees'... because the computer calculates
1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb as 1 Mb, and 1024 MB as 1 Gb.....

so in my case 40007729152 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes => Kilobytes =>
Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 37.2 Gigabytes as far as the computer is
concerned.

Neither calculation of the disk size is 'wrong' ...... they are equivalent.

In your case the drive capacity - approx 80,015,458,304 bytes - will be
referred to by the computer as 74.52 Gb. (The drive capacity may only show
the first 3 digits.)

Hope that helps
Pete

 

[Pete Baker]

Just to add... if you need further info on installing and formatting a
secondary hard drive.... here's a link to a Seagate webpage detailing how to
add a secondary drive to XP. It should be relevant to all drives, not just
Seagate manufactured drives, but Maxtor may have similar info on their
website. Best to choose NTFS format for full capacity on your drive.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

Hope that helps
Pete
-------------

 

[Nocturncsh]

Thanks Pete! Makes a lot of sense.

-----Original Message-----
Hi Nocturnecsh

You are not missing any space with 76 Gb (?), although the drive
manufacturer could be
clearer.

In XP, open My Computer, select the appropriate drive and right-click,
select properties... beside 'capacity'
you will see the total number of bytes on your disk and to the right the
number of Gigabytes.

For example, on my 40 Gb 'data' disk I have

40,007,729,152 bytes... which is

 

[Nocturnecsh]

Thanks Nicholas! That does help! (though it's so
annoying!! ha ha)

 

[Pete Baker]

No problem.
Glad to help clear up any confusion.

Pete
------------------

 

[Donald Link]

I think you will find it is a translation problem how megs are computed.
The same think has happened on 3 80 gig HD that I have installed give or
take a few bytes.