Laptop Hard Drive 160gb showing 127gb Only

[PACUK01]

Hi,

I have a Toshiba Qosmio Laptop running XP SP3. It has two drive bays. I had 80gb in bay 1 and 160gb Seagate in bay 2. I can see almos 158gb on the bay 2 drive. I recently decided to change the 80gb hard drive to a 160gb. I purchased a samsung 160gb hard drive, but when I format it I can only see 127gb. I know there was problems with the atapi.sys file when on SP1. I am on SP3 and last year I formated the Seagate drive and could see 158gb. I haven't changed anything on my laptop. I have sent the drive back and they just keep refering me to all the posts about SP1 and the atapi file. I have tried explaining that I already have a drive 160gb and can see 158 of it. Can anyone help me?

 

[dorfman]

off the top of my head, the only thing I can think is the partition of the drive.

But usually its like 8 gigs max. and whatever amount windows xp takes up...

Windows: partitions your drive as a recovery measure..so you might want to check that out

 

[PACUK01]

I set the partition size myself, but either way..I can make smaller partitions and they will still only add up to 127gb.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

drives are never exactly what they say they are. It's hard to be exact, especially with magnetic disks.

my 40GB WD shows up as 37GB, my 320GB shows up as 298GB, and my 200GB external shows up as 186GB.

it's feasable that a 160GB disk could show up as 127GB. Who made your disk?

 

[PACUK01]

Re: 160 Hard drive showing up as 128

From what I gather it is to do with windows xp sp1 not recognising large drives and it was fixed in sp2. I have checked the registry and it is set "registry bit EnableBigLBA is set to 1" which means my computer should see larger drives. That is why it is seeing the secondry drive as 158gb. I can not understand why it can not see this new drive as 158 gb but only sees it as 127gb. I think the loss of 33gb is unreasonable...even using the fact that HD manufacturers say that 1mb is 1000bits not 1024 bits etc The make is Samsung...whereas the one I can see 158gb is a Seagate.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

just to iterate

8 bits = 1 byte

1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte

1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte



are you formatting it in NTFS or FAT32/exFAT?

 

[PACUK01]

I know manufacturers don't follow the 1024kb = 1mb they drop the 24kb. I am using ntfs, the same as on my other drive.