Disk Space Wrong

[edrw]

I bought a box of hard drives at a garage sale and one of the drives says it's a 160 gig on it but only shows up as a 20 gig. No external jumpers have been set and Partition Magic shows it to be 20 gig too, with no bad sectors. Any ideas about where this has been set and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[kestrel1]

What make & model of drive is it?

 

[edrw]

It's a "white box" that doesn't have the maunfacturer or a model on it.

 

[kestrel1]

Are you sure that the drive is 160gb then? Where does it say that it is 160gb?

 

[edrw]

It has a white sticker on it that says it's 7200 rpm, 160 Gbytes, jumper settings, some voltages, but no brand name or model. It has a jumper to clip it to 32 gig, but it's not on. I assumed that a 20 gig hd wouldn't have that jumper available, but I could be wrong.

 

[kestrel1]

Is the BIOS of the machine that you are attaching this drive to, able to see larger HD's?

 

[edrw]

It does see large hard drives. I'm wondering if something has been set in the hard drive bios or maybe the MBR to limit the size (if that can be done).

 

[edfair]

Not in the MBR. It is set on the hard drive, but never have seen one with the discrpancy you see.

How about using Belarc to find out what it reports internally and looking it up on the manufacturer's site.

In the manufacturing process the capacity is marked. It might be possible for somebody OEMing the drive to run the same equipment to take a current production size and remark the internal parameters.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[kestrel1]

If you use the drive as a slave on a system running Win XP, you may be able to find out the make & model in device manager, under Disk Drives.

 

[edrw]

Here's what Belarc reports:

d: (NTFS on drive 1) 20.24 GB 20.19 GB free

It's running as a slave, but it doesn't give make or model in Device Mgr.

Belarc is a very neat program, it's the first I've heard of it.

 

[edfair]

You could try a 98 bootdisk with a late fdisk and see what it reports.

Or possibly hard drive detection in your BIOS via CMOS setup? Some have it. Give you the options and capability for the 3 possible ways the drive can be used, normal , large, and the 3rd escapes me right now.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.