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Maxtor 250gig Limited to 33.8gig

A

Athlongamer

Golden Member
I just reformated my 250gig hdd. It's a maxtor 6Y250P0. But i recently installed it into another computer and earased all the stuff or atleast i thought i did. But then installed it on my other computer and now it says it's only 33.8 Gbytes big. I've looked at alot of stuff. Whats the deal???

Thanks in advance,

Jordan
 
sp2 and no i didn't try install on it, i just used an older drive i had laying around. But when i open it in My computer it only shows 33.8 gigs available.
 
What shows up in Disk Management? Right click My Computer, select Manage, and click on Disk Management. It should show you the partitions. From here, you can repartition and format the drive.
 
When you installed the drive in the other computer, did you move the jumpers (to set master/slave) - perhaps you've ended up with the jumper on the capacity limit pins

see Diamond Max 9 Quick Specs

Alternately, perhaps the MBR has become corrupted. Try running the recovery console from the XP boot CD and doing a fixmbr command.

 
Originally posted by: Uncle Bob
When you installed the drive in the other computer, did you move the jumpers (to set master/slave) - perhaps you've ended up with the jumper on the capacity limit pins

see Diamond Max 9 Quick Specs

Alternately, perhaps the MBR has become corrupted. Try running the recovery console from the XP boot CD and doing a fixmbr command.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, seen this one before.
I'd put my money on this being the answer. :thumbsup:
 
Originally posted by: Dopefiend
Originally posted by: Uncle Bob
When you installed the drive in the other computer, did you move the jumpers (to set master/slave) - perhaps you've ended up with the jumper on the capacity limit pins

see Diamond Max 9 Quick Specs

Alternately, perhaps the MBR has become corrupted. Try running the recovery console from the XP boot CD and doing a fixmbr command.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, seen this one before.
I'd put my money on this being the answer. :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

I'll third this - some hard drives have a 32GB setting, which is suspiciously close to 33.8GB....though I'd expect it to be a bit less than 32GB, but then, I've never used the 32GB setting, so I don't know what normal behavior is for it.
 
did this ever get resolved? i have a similar prob with a 120gb diamondmax plus 9. cap limit jumper is not enabled, but bios still recognized the drive as 33gb. hmmm.....
 
spanky,

Don't know if the previous answers solved the original posters problem....

Did this maxtor drive ever work properly in your rig? or has it come out of another 'puter?

I notice you have a WD 120GB drive already so that means that there isn't any bios or setup issues.....

are you running into the limitation in XP or when using FDISK?

 
Originally posted by: Uncle Bob
spanky,

Don't know if the previous answers solved the original posters problem....

Did this maxtor drive ever work properly in your rig? or has it come out of another 'puter?

I notice you have a WD 120GB drive already so that means that there isn't any bios or setup issues.....

are you running into the limitation in XP or when using FDISK?
Click to expand...

hi unclebob,

this is actually a hd i just acquired. i was hoping to slap it into an xbox, but noticed that during initial testing on my pc, the bios detects it as 33gb. being that the bios detects the hd size incorrectly, i am sort of doubting it is an issue with winxp. i did boot into xp and delete all partitions, recreate a single partition of max size (in this case, 32gb), and format it. operation seems perfectly normal... just that the bios detects the drive WAAAAY too small. as i mentioned in my pervious post, the cap limit jumper is not on. i'm going to try to use the maxtor diag software (whatever it may be called these days... last i remember, it was maxblast) to see if there are any possible leads. however, i do not have high hopes for this situation 🙁
 
well, maxblast would have been my next suggestion, hope it works for you 🙂

kinda strange though that the bios detects it as 32GB...
 
Btw, sometimes the "32GiB capacity clip", is done via host commands to set a "soft LBA clip" setting in the HD's firmware (persistantly). It essentially performs the same function as that 32GiB jumper, except that it will "stick" even when the jumper is removed. I think that you can use some versions of IBM/Hitachi's "FeatureTool" software, to access to "soft LBA clip" settings and reset them. (The ATA commands to do so are standardized, I believe, so it should be safe.)

During the heydays of the IBM GXP "scandal", IBM had been known to send out some brand-new drives, that were "soft clipped" to the size of the drive that they were RMA replacements for, but the actual drive had a greater true capacity. You had to use that program to reset/remove the clip setting, and were then able to utilize the entire drive.
 
lol Sry for not responding.....i could have sworn i wrote back.......

Anyway, that did fix the problem. Apparently it was the jumper settin on the back. I must have switched the jumper thinking i was putting it into cable select but accedently put it in capacity limiter......Why would you want to have a capacity limiter setting on your hdd?? Would it really be that big of a help if you did need it??
 
Originally posted by: Athlongamer
lol Sry for not responding.....i could have sworn i wrote back.......

Anyway, that did fix the problem. Apparently it was the jumper settin on the back. I must have switched the jumper thinking i was putting it into cable select but accedently put it in capacity limiter......Why would you want to have a capacity limiter setting on your hdd?? Would it really be that big of a help if you did need it??
Click to expand...

I think it's a compatibility setting for some really old motherboards - they might not even be able to see the drive if it's over 32GiB. At least, I think that's what it has to do with...
 
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