Re: External Hard Drive not found

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Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:08:49 -0500

I can think of 2 factors that could be in play:

(1) Maxtor and others sometimes include a small odd partition on a
retail drive that contains software they think may help the buyer. It
can be deleted. Talk to Maxtor tech support; they're helpful.

(2) there's a semantic problem resulting from different opinions about
what a giga- (or mega- or kilo- or tera- or peta-) byte really is. If
you're advertising a drive's capacity you get a bigger number if you use
1000 bytes as the basic unit; if you're beholden to accuracy, you get a
smaller number by using the correct number, 1024 bytes, as the basic unit.

You could try fooling around with a spreadsheet or calculator to see
whether and to what extent this latter notion may contribute to your
disturbing anomaly. I suspect that's only part of it, though, and Tech
Support would probably be the fastest way to get the right answer.

As far as what Exp-lorer tells you, NTFS tends to claim a good bit of
space as "reserved" for future index-related (Master File Table, etc)
use...but that space is actually not in use - yet. As you populate the
drive with your own stuff, the MFT-reserved space will get used up both
by the growing MFT and if absolutely necessary (and only up to a point)
by your own stuff.

In general, the advertised capacity on the box is more than the actual
capacity of the drive, and the difference is larger in proportion to the
size of the drive.

Peter wrote:

> Dan Seur wrote:
>
>> If the system refuses to format the entire unallocated space, then you
>> need to follow the advice in other posts here about updating W2k so it
>> can handle very large disks. (The LBA stuff.) If the system DOES see
>> and format the entire drive, then your W2k is already updated with the
>> proper service pack.
>
>
> Windows was only reporting a 128gb capacity for 160gb drive - bios was
> showing the full amount. Followed your advice and MS knowledge base
> article 305098, adding the EnableBigLba value into the registry.
>
> Disk is now showing 148gb ! Better but still not all the way there.
> Confusingly, explorer reports capacity to be 148gb, free space to be
> 148gb, abd used space to be 12gb.
>
> Would be grateful for any further input. Do you feel that it is safe to
> start using a disk that isn't correctly formatted to its true capacity.
> Will I be storing up problems for the future?
>
> Many thanks for the help,
>
> Peter

• Previous message: Peter: "Re: External Hard Drive not found"
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