25% of HDD gone? Though still working.Any comments?

[unbiased]

My friend's 41 GB IBM HDD, which had been working fine for a long time needed repartitioning and reformatting.After Fdisking the Space detected was 32.8 GB instead of 41 GB.The disk could be partitioned and formatted and OS loaded without hassels.

One of the guys suggested using ZAP and DFT utilities of IBM but still the disk shows 32.8 GB.My question is --
1) has the drive become partly unusable ?and if so would the drive be working even after losing approx. 25% of space?Is there any other remedy?
Please help!

 

[TheInvincibleMustard]

Sure you partitioned it correctly?

Did you try running a surface scan on it to see if that 25% is due to bad sectors? If it is, I'd seriously recommend ditching that HDD, as it's not going to last much longer.

The mathematical mumbo-jumbo can't take credit for that much of a drop (ie, boxes count a GB as 1billion bytes exactly, while in actual computer terms it's 1024^3 bytes) ... if that was the case, it'd be approx 35GB instead of the 41GB claimed ...

 

[bendixG15]

Suggest you go to IBM site and get their HD utilitiies to test out the drive......

 

[nightowl]

What OS are you using and what file system is the drive formatted in? If you are using 2000/XP and trying to format the drive in FAT32 then you are seen the software limitation of 2000/XP. The largest drive you can make as FAT32 in 2000/XP is 32GB. 2000/XP can read larger FAT32 drives but only can format up to 32GB drives. To get around this you can either move to NTFS (recommended) or use a ME boot disk and us it to format the drive as FAT32.

 

[unbiased]

Thank you nightowl, It seems you have hit upon the nail.The only thing which bugs me is that at least IBM's DFT utility should recognize the full space.BTW the original partitions on the disk were formatted in NTFS.Now I tried to format it in FAT 32