My disk size is wrong

[dieselstation]

Windows is reporting the wrong disk size for my drive D:\. I only use that drive for storage.. and i can't seem to fix it. It won't let me run scandisk in windows or using norton disk doctor. and even fixing it during boot doesn't fix it. what can i do?

Windows XP
drive D is NTFS partition
ran Scandisk and Norton Disk Doctor and nothing happens.
60g drive. used 19G, windows sees 32G left. i'm missing about 4-5G?

 

[slatr]

What does disk management report?

programs/admin tools/ computer mgmt

Slatr

 

[dieselstation]

here's some screenshots.

Drive D:\ Properties
Disk Management
Contents of D:\

 

[MrDudeMan]

that is because when you have big drives, it has to have an allocation table. on a 20.5 gb, i can only use like 19.1 or something like that....there is nothing you can do about it i dont think.

 

[RemyCanad]

Hmm I dont know. Are you sure you are looking at the whole drive? It looks like you are just looking a one folder.

Also what version of norton do you have? If its anything less than 2002 just unistall it. I have 2001 and when I updated to XP I had to go and download a patch from Symantic to even make it work. And once I did norton disk defrag never worked, and it even killed windows defrag. So once I unistalled the utilites portion of norton sys works it then worked fine.

 

[RemyCanad]

My 30gig drive is only reported at 28.8. The reasons is that windows calculates space different than the HD manufactures and BIOS manufactures.

 

[yomega]

Your drive is the correct size. HD manufacurers say GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes when in reality (binary), 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

So using this conversion factor 60 fake GB = 60 * 1000000000 / 1073741824 = 55.88 real GB.

EDIT: if you want to know where 1,073,741,824 came from, its 1024^3

 

[Athlon4all]

yomega's got it. See, a real GB isn't 1000MB, it's 1024MB and while that wasn't allways noticeable, as drive sizes increased it became noticeable.

EDIT: My 3000th post. I'm a Platinum Member. Yay!!

 

[crt1530]

Hard drive manufacturers report 60,000,000,000 (60x1000^3) bytes as 60GB. The REAL definition of gigabytes would give 60GB as 64,424,509,440 (60x1024x1024x1024) bytes. If you have a hard drive that is listed by a hard drive manufacturer as 60GB, it will show up in windows as 55.88GB (60,000,000,000/1024^3GB). There is nothing wrong here aside from your expectations.

 

[Theslowone]

Yeah it is:
2^10=1KB
2^20=1MB
2^30=1GB

 

[dieselstation]

no no.. you guys don't understand. First it says i had 32.8G left on my drive. I then went and deleted 5 .iso files which i downloaded earlier. those 5 files combined was about 3 Gigs. After i deleted them, it Still said i had 32.8G left. My recycle bin is set to empty deleted files automatically.. so i don't understand what's going on here.

 

[MrDudeMan]

theslowone you are totally wrong dude. dont even give your theory, those guys are totally right. it goes all the way down to how many bits are in a charater. 1024kb is in ONE mb, 1024mb is in ONE gb, 1024gb is in ONE tb, and so on. the reason you have -4.2gb is because of the file allocation table like i said before. the hard drive has to know where to go to look for a file. the disks are like a coordinate plane with an x and a y axis. that is why a boot sector virus is bad..its tampering with that stuff. also if you run a magnet over a hard drive, it corrupts the FAT (file allocation table) which is also where fat16 and fat32 come from...the size of the sectors in the FAT...it all makes sense, calm down dude you didnt lose any space, and plus..you have 56gb, you are crazy if you use that just filling it up with random stuff

 

[Theslowone]

work the math fella, it is right. 2^10 is the same thing as 1024. But 2^n is how it is usually represented.

And if you did not clean your recycle bin then the files are still there and hence the same number being seen, remember you have a hidden bin on your storage drive too.

 

[dieselstation]

no.. i totally understand the total usuable disk space. i'm not questioning that. a newly formatted drive will NOT give me 60gigs.. but around 56 gigs.. i understand that. but that's not my problem. my problem is that after i deleted about 3 gigs worth.. my disk size says it's still the same as before. and i can't seem to correct this with scandisk or norton or anything.

 

[MrDudeMan]

oh....well try restarting? =/ or install 3gb worth of stuff and delete it again..just mess with it and see how it goes....trial and error lol


if your bin is empty then i dunno


and sorry theslowone about flaming you...i didnt understand what you meant, but it makes sense....sorry

 

[Theslowone]

np

 

[FishTankX]

My computer reported wrong diskspace from the begining. it was hallarious.

Formated like this
C:15GB
D:20GB
e:5GB

Result?

C:37GB
D:18GB
E:5GB

After that, anything installed to D: would corrupt. Sollution?

This is what you should try if you find *NO* other sollution as I don't reccomend this with critical data.

1.Back up *ALL* data to Secondary disc

2.Destroy all partitions on your primary disc.

3.Low level reformat

4.Fill with Zeros

5.Repartition

6.Back up *ALL* data to newly formated primary disc


That's what seagate told me I had to do. Bummer, eh?

Oh, and make sure when you reformat the limit capacity jumper is on.. I think.. ask your vendor WTF is going on. They'll probably know! Then again.. just forget about my above method until you ask your vendor. Since it's dangerous to your data's health.

 

[ledzepp98]

dieselstation:

i noticed you have norton installed... do you have the norton autoprotect recycle bin enabled? if so, the files you deleted are still in the recycle bin but hidden (and still being allocated the full space) this way they can be restored by norton un-erease. the recycle bin should be in the main drive directory, so if you open a command prompt and go to the d:\> prompt, then type cd recycled, then type dir, you will see if the recycle bin is truly empty.

 

[dieselstation]

hmmm.. but if you set the recycle bin to auto delete.. shouldn't it delete anyways? i'll check that auto protect feature

 

[SHADMW]

Try right clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop. Choose the option "Empty Norton Protected Files." And then purge all.

 

[dieselstation]

wow.. that was it! now i'm at 36Gigs free.. how strange. i never knew norton did that. thanks!

 

[Electronics4Life]

I on the other hand have a 40gig hard drive dectected as a 31.4g drive. I've never had to RMA before and I am not looking forward to it.

Yes I have current bios and all that good stuff. Recently I got "delayed write failed" errors. Then it wouldn't format "regularly". So i did a low level format. Bah..it's a Maxtor too..which is suppose to be a solid brand.