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how much is 40 gigs?

Y

Yaotl

Senior member
okay, so my roommate just received a 40gig hdd from newegg. it's an ibm 60gxp. after it's formatted, the size is only 32 gigs. is this normal? i know it probably shouldn't be 40gigs, but 8 gigs missing? that seems a bit much to me.
 
you are correct.. 8 gigs is WAY too much to be missing

did you partition it with fdisk? if so, boot off a win98 startup disk, type fdisk and hit "4" to view partitions..perhaps there's two partitons set up? if so, you should just make it one big one, then reboot, then reformat
 
i used fdisk before i did anything. to make the primary partition, there was only a maximum of around 32gigs.
 
This is a long shot, I know, but anyway... How old is his computer? Has he updated the BIOS recently? Maybe that is not seeing the whole thing, and an update will cure it. Before updating, though, you might want to try checking the BIOS settings to make sure that the drive is being detected properly. HTH.
 
what should i check in the bios? how do i get the info on how many cylinders and whatnot should be there?
 
I think it will list this stuff on the label on top of the drive, but I can't check to be sure, since both of my Western Digitals are stacked right on top of each other and right underneath my floppy drive (and I don't want to remove one to check 🙂).
 
well, i checked a couple of things, but i'm still stuck. his bios is up to date and i can't really find anything else to check.
 
Drive manufacturers consider 1GB to equal 1,000,000,000 bytes, although that's not technically correct. So you may have a 40GB drive which has 40,000,000,000 total bytes, but only 38GB. That's perfectly normal, it's just the way they rate their drives. If you are missing much more, you have other problems. Look for an extra partition, bad sectors, etc
 
it's probably the motherboard. i have a p2b-f (with the very latest beta bios even) with a WD 40GB and it could only recognize 32GB...so i used a Promise controller and it recognizes 38GB.
 
You've got your numbers mixed up. He said he's got a 40Gb and when formatted it only came out to be 32GB. Not 38GB as you mentioned. True, 1MB is equal to 1,000,000 bytes as per manufacuturer (using the decimal method) but in Binary, 1MB is equal to 1,020,000 bytes. That's a difference of 20KB per 1MB. Which is equal to 20Mb per GB or a total of 800MB on a 40GB HDD. So the 40GB technically should have at least formatted to 38-39GB. Isn't there some kind of limitation on the Fdisk command which is on the same issue as this?
 
I just put a 40gb drive into a computer at work the other day.. was a year-old system or so, and had a 32mb BIOS limitation. Are you sure your bios is fully up to date? In my case a simple flash up to the newest solved it.
 
Yeah, as has been said some BIOS's have a 32GB limitation. Scary, that we're hitting BIOS limits again. I still have an old system that wont take over 8.4GB. 🙂 Unless I use Linux, I have to use drive overlay software or my Highpoint controller.
 
i have the exact same drive and splited into 2 partitions, total capacity should be a little bit over 38 gigs.
 
In binary a MB is 2^20=1,048,576 bytes, a KB is 2^10=1024 bytes, and a GB is 2^30=1,073,741,824 bytes.

I'm going to take a guess at this but if the manufacturer claimed it at 40Gigs while maintaining a 1Gig to 1,000,000,000 bytes ratio, the hard drive should be formated at 40,000,000,000 / 2^30 = 37.253 true(binary) GB.
 
Sounds like a BIOS limitation. Either buy a separate controller card or partition it into two drives one with say 8-10 Gb and the other with the rest. Either solution should take care of the issue. Maybe a new BIOS, but sounds like you already tried that.
 


<< i have a p2b-f (with the very latest beta bios even) with a WD 40GB and it could only recognize 32GB >>


I had upgraded a friends p2b-f 2 months back and after updating the bios, it recognized full 45 gig's of the HD.
 
i cant believe none of you had said this yet:

if you jumper the HD wrong, you will get funky sizes. this happened with one of my maxtors.

booty
 
its most likely what bbd said. many older motherboards cannot handle drives bigger than ~36gig (and can't be fixed by a bios update), so a lot of larger drives have a jumper which limits the number of cylinders that will be used (so the drive formats to 32GB).

check your drive jumpers, and see if that works... otherwise, it may just be a motherboard limitation, in which case you can either replace the mb or try an add-on controller card (like the promise dq suggested).
 


<< I think fat32 has a 32 gig limit... or at least some version of limits >>



&quot;FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size&quot; quote from Microsoft
 
nope not every computer uses fat32, there's over like 90 different file-system formats.. fat16 and fat32, are jus common ones used in dos/windows9x, and some older OS'es like cp/m.. far as 32gig limit, nope i have one partition on this box as a 38gig fat32 partitions.. ya it has a theoretical limit of 2TB's.. i would call the dealer about that, possibly a defective drive, maybe.. my 2cents
-neural
 
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