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Windows not recognizing full capacity of Hard Drive

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Drunkentig3r

Member
Ok, so I've had this problem for a while, and up to now it was only a minor annoyance, but now that I have just reformatted my hard drive, its driving me nuts. First off, I have a Western Digital Caviar 250GB ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive-yeah I know its old, and I should've moved onto a SATA drive, but this is what I got stuck with. I know that Windows XP doesn't recognize more then 137GB of hard drive space due to something in the registry (or so I'm told), but with SP2, wasn't that supposed to be worked out? I know that newer Windows XP install discs (SP2), when your installing the O/S it shows the full capacity of the hard drive during the setup process, but unfortunately, I only have the install disc for Windows XP regular-the "first edition" basically. During my installation, Windows only recognized 137GB of space, and for some odd reason now, it states that the full capacity of my hard drive is only 128GB. So what should I do? How do I fix this problem? I mean, I've tried re-reformatting my hard drive, but its just a cycle; the problem repeats itself no matter how many times I try to do a clean install. Is there a program by any chance that will take care of this for me (preferrably shareware/freeware)? I want to be able to utilize the full capacity of my hard drive, not just half of it. Your help would be greatly appreciated.
 
And yes, I've updated to the latest BIOS for my motherboard. In case anyone asks, here are my computer specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (939) @2.6Ghz
MSI K8N-SLI Nforce4 Motherboard
OCZ 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 (DDR 400) Dual Channel Kit w/Custom timings
MSI Geforce 7800GT OC'd to 454/1.18Ghz with Arctic Cooling NV Silencer installed
Antec Smartpower 2.0 500Watt Power Supply
Antec(x2) 120mm case fans
Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM ATA Hard Drive
Lite-On 8x Dual Format DVD Burner
Generic DVD-ROM Drive
Antec Super LANboy ATX Mid-tower Case
 
Ok so I think I did it the right way-please advise:

1. Installed Latest XP Service Pack (SP1 for now-downloading SP2 as we speak).

2. Checked to see if "EnableBigLba" was set to value of 1 in Regedit.exe
(HKEY_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters)

3. Downloaded Western Digital Data Lifeguard Program

4. Used Data Lifeguard to set up a second partition (Drive F🙂 using the unallocated space on hard drive

I now have two partitions, Drive C: being my "Local Disk" and Drive F: being the "New Volume" set up by the Data Lifeguard program. Drive C: has 137GB of total space (shows up as 127GB though-I'm guessing the O/S takes up the remaining 10GB of space) while Drive F: has 104GB of space, 67GB of which is taken up (have no clue what occupies this space). Grand total: Approximately 241GB of space.

Did I do everything correctly? I mean, it would've been nice if I could just have one single partition that utilized the full capacity of my hard drive, but I'm fine with this-big improvement either way.

I still have a question or two remaining though:

1. The estimated total capacity of my hard drive is 241GB; Western Digital advertised my hard drive as having 250GB of space; is it just due to marketing? (meaning, even though 241GB is the maximum amount of storage, they obviously can't sell "241GB" of hard drive space, and so just marked it as having "250GB", a nice round number).

2. If its not just a marketing ploy, what is taking up that remaining few gigs of space? Is it basically just the operating system (Windows XP)?
 
1. The estimated total capacity of my hard drive is 241GB; Western Digital advertised my hard drive as having 250GB of space; is it just due to marketing? (meaning, even though 241GB is the maximum amount of storage, they obviously can't sell "241GB" of hard drive space, and so just marked it as having "250GB", a nice round number).

2. If its not just a marketing ploy, what is taking up that remaining few gigs of space? Is it basically just the operating system (Windows XP)?
Click to expand...

From Wikipedia:

"Hard drive manufacturers typically specify drive capacity using 'SI prefixes', that is, the SI definition of the prefixes "giga" and "mega." This is largely for historical reasons, since disk drive storage capacities exceeded millions of bytes [4] long before there were standard 'binary prefixes' (even before there were the SI prefixes, 1960). The IEC only standardized 'binary prefixes' in 1999. As it turned out, many practitioners early on in the computer and semiconductor industries adopted the term kilobyte to describe 210 (1024) bytes because 1024 is "close enough" to the metric prefix kilo, which is defined as 103 or 1000. Sometimes this non-SI conforming usage include a qualifier such as '"1 kB = 1,024 Bytes"' but this qualifier was frequently omitted, particularly in marketing literature. This trend became habit and continued to be applied to the prefixes "mega," "giga," "tera," and even "peta."

Operating systems and their utilities, particularly visual operating systems such as Microsoft's various Windows operating systems frequently report capacity using binary prefixes which results in a discrepancy between the drive manufacturer's stated capacity and the system's reported capacity. Obviously the difference becomes much more noticeable in reported capacities in the multiple gigabyte range, and users will often notice that the volume capacity reported by their OS is significantly less than that advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. For example, Microsoft's Windows 2000 reports drive capacity both in decimal to 12 or more significant digits and with binary prefixes to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk drive specified by a drive manufacturer as a '30 GB' drive has its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as '30,065,098,568 bytes' and '28.0 GB'. The drive manufacturer has used the SI definition of "giga," 109 and can be considered as an approximation of a gibibyte. Since utilities provided by the operating system probably define a gigabyte as 230, or 1073741824, bytes, the reported capacity of the drive will be closer to 28.0 GB, a difference of approximately 7%. For this very reason, many utilities that report capacity have begun to use the aforementioned IEC standard binary prefixes (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) since their definitions are unambiguous.

Many people mistakenly attribute the discrepancy in reported and specified capacities to reserved space used for file system and partition accounting information. However, for large (several GiB) filesystems, this data rarely occupies more than a few MiB, and therefore cannot possibly account for the apparent "loss" of tens of GBs."

Hence, my '60' GB iPod is actually 55.6, and so on. 🙂
 
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