lost hard disk space (1 Viewer)

[Tim_Y_F]

I have a blank 80G 7200rpm western digital 800BB Hard drive and a 4.3G IBM 5400rpm hard drive with windows 98.

Strange things happen....

Using the IBM drive as the boot drive I satrted to partition the WD drive assigned as letter D.

Fdisk claims the drive is only 10G's. Anyway, I partitioned it as one primary partition, skipped formatting and restarted the computer and fired up windows 98. Surely enough, the D: drive as there and windows said the drives cpapacity was 76.3GB when I clicked on the 'format' tab. It was a releif that it wasn't 10G but where was the missing 4 GB???

 

[Scott Falkler]

The missing space was used in the formatting process, or the drive space is calculated differently by the manufacturer 1000B=1KB instead of 1024B=1KB.

That's the way it is, there's no way to change it or regain it...

 

[Colin Dunn]

All the hard drive manufacturers consider a "gigabyte" to be 1 billion bytes, not 1,073,741,824 bytes (the correct number of bytes in a TRUE gigabyte). This allows them to overstate the real capacity of their drives by 7%. Fortunately, RAM capacity is still sold in true megabytes/gigabytes.

 

[John Wilson]

Tim,

I think I can explain part of what you saw as I ran into the same issue. The version of Fdisk that was loaded onto your boot disk can onle "see" 64GB max. If it sees anything larger, it defaults to a size that is roughly calculated as drive size-64GB or in yours and my case about 10GB. There is an article on MS's website about a new Fdisk.exe file that should be copied to the boot disk.

If I'm off base here, someone please correct or elaborate.