Full Harddrive capacity not recognized

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marty Beach
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Marty Beach

Under Disk Management, it shows my primary drive as holding 111.75 GB. It
is a Western Digital WD1200JB and is suppose to have 120 Gigabytes of space.

I've heard about Microsoft using a different format to determine drive
capacity. Was I jipped on my drive, is MS' 111.75 GB the same as everyone
else's 120GB, or why would Windows be unable to recognize the other 8.25 GB?

thanks,
Marty B.

running WinXP Pro w/Service Pack 1
 
Sorry I don't know the answer but if anybody out there
does I have a similar problem with a Maxtor 120GB drive
that is split into two partitions and the total of the
two drives comes to 114.5GB?
 
A hard drive capacity is typically given in its unformatted state,
formatting utilises some capacity.
Can be up to 10% approx.of unformated capacity
Theres no prob with yr disks.
 
Marty

You are not missing any space - although the drive manufacturer could be
clearer. For drive manufacturers 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 Gb, whereas an OS
will regard 1,073,741,824 bytes as 1 Gb. (It's a decimal V binary thing)

The best way to see this is 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 120 Gb drive I have 120,023,252,992 bytes... which is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 111 Gb.

The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as 120
Gb... and, in purely decimal terms, it is - 120,000,000,000 bytes.

The 111 Gb is what the operating system (XP) 'sees'... because the OS
calculates the storage in binary terms... 1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb as 1
Mb, and 1024 MB as 1 Gb.....

so in my case 120,023,252,992 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes =>
Kilobytes => Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 111.78 Gigabytes as far as the
computer is concerned. (The drive capacity may only show the first 3
digits.)

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

In your case, as you already know, the drive capacity of 120,000,00,000
bytes (or close to that value) is referred to by 'My Computer' as 111.75 Gb
after the above calculation.

Of course, by using the decimal definition drive manufacturers are only
obliged to provide 120,000,000,000 bytes when they claim a drive size of 120
Gb.

Hope that helps
Pete
 
Western Digital along with some other Hardrive
manufactures considers 1mb = 1000000 bytes. Windows sees
1mb = 1048576bytes (1024x1024). If you take this into
account 120mil bytes will only show up as 114.5GB in the
eyes of windows. If you go the properties of the
hardrive in windows it should show you this :)
 
Plus, it's the way that hard drive makers advertise their sizes. They
consider a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes, but your computer sees a kilobyte as
1,024 bytes, so your 120 GB drive is really a 117 GB.
 
Marty Beach said:
Under Disk Management, it shows my primary drive as holding 111.75 GB. It
is a Western Digital WD1200JB and is suppose to have 120 Gigabytes of space.

I've heard about Microsoft using a different format to determine drive
capacity. Was I jipped on my drive, is MS' 111.75 GB the same as everyone
else's 120GB, or why would Windows be unable to recognize the other 8.25 GB?

thanks,
Marty B.

running WinXP Pro w/Service Pack 1
Click to expand...


...and now the visual portion of our answer....

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...X5hbnl_JnBfc29ydF9ieT1kZmx0JnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=

http://tinyurl.com/3an62

--
D

I'm not an MVP a VIP nor do I have ESP.
I was just trying to help.
Please use your own best judgment before implementing any suggestions or
advice herein.
No warranty is expressed or implied.
Your mileage may vary.
See store for details. :)

Remove shoes to E-mail.

--
D

I'm not an MVP a VIP nor do I have ESP.
I was just trying to help.
Please use your own best judgment before implementing any suggestions or
advice herein.
No warranty is expressed or implied.
Your mileage may vary.
See store for details. :)

Remove shoes to E-mail.
 
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