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Wrong capacity shown for hard drive

lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
I just got a hard drive enclosure today. I put an old 250gb WD hard drive that came out of a dead system in, and it only shows up as a 60gb capacity. The hd was given to me, so I don't know the circumstances of the computers death.

I guess what I'm wondering is... can a hard drive be only partially bad? The size stated doesn't really make sense to me since 60gb isn't any kind of even fraction of 250gb.

Ideas?
 
Originally posted by: PurdueRy
have you formatted it?
Click to expand...

Yea, when I first plugged it in it showed up as a 60gb drive, which also had "system volume information" on it, which I couldn't view. I did a normal(not fast format) and I'm the proud owner of a 60gb(250gb) hd. One thing I didn't think of. If the disk had been partitioned into smaller sizes, would those maybe not show up in a usb enclosure?

Edit: It's an Adaptec 3.5" enclosure part#ACS-100
 
Lots of hard drives are made with odd fractions of their actual platter capacity. Three platters of 60GB (30 per side) ought to be 180GB but they'd sell it as a 160GB drive and just not use part of the inner tracks. And don't forget the marketing-defined capacity of 250 billion bytes is actually only 232 binary GB, so 4 60GB platters could easily do that.

It's not likely of course that suddenly only one platter is accessible but works fine; in the case of one failing, the whole drive would more likely fail. If any sort of drive failure occurred, you wouldn't want to use that drive even if it seemed to be working now.

http://www.storagereview.com or other reviews of a particular drive often indicate the actual platter density.

Run the manufacturer's diagnostic utility on the drive and write all zeroes to it. That will also probably show you the actual capacity or at least the number of LBA blocks, which I think you can multiply by 512 bytes per block to get the capacity.
 
Originally posted by: lxskllr
Originally posted by: PurdueRy
have you formatted it?
Click to expand...

Yea, when I first plugged it in it showed up as a 60gb drive, which also had "system volume information" on it, which I couldn't view. I did a normal(not fast format) and I'm the proud owner of a 60gb(250gb) hd. One thing I didn't think of. If the disk had been partitioned into smaller sizes, would those maybe not show up in a usb enclosure?
Click to expand...

The partitions should still be visible to the OS. If Windows Disk Management doesn't show any other partitions, then either the partition table is bad or there just isn't any more accessible space on the drive. Writing all zeroes to the drive ought to fix that, and also verify whether there are any bad sectors.

As Aluvus asked, what enclosure? It's unlikely that it's an issue of the chipset not being able to see large drives, but it's possible.
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Originally posted by: lxskllr
Originally posted by: PurdueRy
have you formatted it?
Click to expand...

Yea, when I first plugged it in it showed up as a 60gb drive, which also had "system volume information" on it, which I couldn't view. I did a normal(not fast format) and I'm the proud owner of a 60gb(250gb) hd. One thing I didn't think of. If the disk had been partitioned into smaller sizes, would those maybe not show up in a usb enclosure?
Click to expand...

The partitions should still be visible to the OS. If Windows Disk Management doesn't show any other partitions, then either the partition table is bad or there just isn't any more accessible space on the drive. Writing all zeroes to the drive ought to fix that, and also verify whether there are any bad sectors.

As Aluvus asked, what enclosure? It's unlikely that it's an issue of the chipset not being able to see large drives, but it's possible.
Click to expand...



Adaptec 3.5" enclosure part#ACS-100 I'm going to WDs site to get their hd utility now.
 
Note that you'll have to plug the drive into your mainboard's IDE port to use the utility in all likelihood. In fact, it might have been good to try that anyway to see if it makes any difference.
 
It could just have a 60GB partition with the rest of the space unused.

XP's Disk management tool might not be able to see the unallocated space while it's in an enclosre, but it's worth looking. If it only sees 60 GB you might, as already suggested, take the drive out of the enclosure and attach it to a motherboard IDE port.
 
I'm running WDs setup utility now. Curiously enough It shows 120gb disk size 😕 Getting better, but still not 250gb :laugh: One thing I forgot to mention... When I first got this drive I tried hooking it up to a scavenged computer with no luck. The scavenged computer would read another old hd, but not this one.
 
Sounds like you probably shouldn't use this drive for anything you would be upset about losing without warning. Like maybe as an internal drive for your pagefile only, or only for storing copies of files for transfer to another computer while the originals are still stored locally.
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Sounds like you probably shouldn't use this drive for anything you would be upset about losing without warning. Like maybe as an internal drive for your pagefile only, or only for storing copies of files for transfer to another computer while the originals are still stored locally.
Click to expand...



I don't intend to use the drive for anything important. I just wanted to try my new enclosure, and also try this hd out. I suspected that this hd would work in some capacity, but was never able to get it going. I'll probably end up using it to transport mp3s and stuff to the laptop I use at work.
 
Originally posted by: lxskllr
I'm running WDs setup utility now. Curiously enough It shows 120gb disk size 😕 Getting better, but still not 250gb :laugh: One thing I forgot to mention... When I first got this drive I tried hooking it up to a scavenged computer with no luck. The scavenged computer would read another old hd, but not this one.
Click to expand...

If you have old PC this is normal because thats max capacity older mobos could show or if you dont have Win XP SP1.
 
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