New SATA hard drive brought, not capacity it says it is???

Hi there, i am a friend of ' mcadam88' if any of you know him. I have recently brought a sata hard drive Maxtor 200 gb. . . Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 200Gb OEM SATA 8MB Cache NCQ (6B200M0). Link. . .

http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/product.php?productid=17862.

After formatting and installing windows and checking the capacity in my computer i have a capacity of 127 gb . It clearly says on the drive 200 gb, i know hard drives arent exact to the mega bite but not 70 gigs off, lol

What could be causing this?. . . a defect in the hard drive, or sumthin to do with partinioning. I installed and formatted windows on the whole space and didnt make a seperate partition for it if this helps at all?

Any help much appreiciated

 

Is this hard drive brand new retail? OEM? Refurbished?

Assuming you are running Win2K/XP, you can check how the drive is partitioned by opening control panel, administrative tools, computer management, and clicking on disk management in the left hand panel.

Post back and let us know!

 

thanks for your reply,
the drive was brought brand new oem yesterday. I didnt make a partition on the drive, during formatting i worked out how much space was on the drive. It dsplayed around 130 thousand mb, so i divided this by 1024 and got around 130 gb. Also disk manager is showing almost 130 gb, 70 gb short of what it says it is. Is it possible teh actually disk could be damaged and of lowered the capacity or just the wrong size disk been put in the drive?

I await your reply

 

Heh, I won't be the one to say that either is impossible. You could try a report from SANDRA...that's the System ANalyzing Diagnosing and Reporting Application...she's available at http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=

In the Drives Information module, you can check your hard drive. It will tell you about the physical drive.

If you are still not satisfied, I would recommend browsing through the diagnostic tools available on this site. I haven't used many myself, but I'm sure you can find something that will test your HDD for you.

 

okay, ill give that a go, Thank you for your help, its much appreiciated.

 

mcadam88 warned us about you....
But seriously, you can't depend on the vendor to have sold you the proper
drive (especially oem stuff). It may be the proper drive, i'm just pointing out the possibility.
But if you go to Start > control panel > system > hardware tab >
device manager and click on disk drives, it will show you the actual model
number of your hard drive. From there you can do a google search to verify
that it is actually the size the vendor stated.
Once you verify this, you will be better armed to find answers here.

 

I cant remember where i heard this but i KNOW it was on these forums... The same problem was posted and the user had winXP.. I think the fix was to update XP to SP1 of SP@ (service pack 1 or 2, 2 is recommended) Since earlier versions of windows have a 120gb cap.

If u look in disk management under computer management does it show up the extra unallocated space? You can do this before and after you update windows.

You can update windows via http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/v6/default.aspx?ln=en-us


Heres a relating article i found on this subject : http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=294480

 

Yup, Windows XP out of the box doesn't support 48 bit LBA. You must use XP SP1, or SP2. To get the full capacity on a clean install, you will need to make a slipstream install of Windows XP w/ SP1, or SP2. This is provided that your motherboard also supports 48 bit LBA, which it should if its fairly new.

 

Thanks for all your suggestions guys, dont believe a work mcadam says ,

lol, joking. Ill try the sp1 option, so do i just need to install the service pack now and that should solve it? U mentioned a slip stream. I have some computer knowledge but not that much, can u explain slip streaming please?

 

Sure. Slipstreaming allows you to integrate the service pack into XP, without installing either.

Might as well do SP2.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

This is a good walkthrough.

If you install Sp2 now, it will see the rest of the hard drive, however, you will have to make another partition to get the space back.

 

okay, thanks for all your help people, ill give this a go and let u know how i get on. Thanks again.

 

Well provided you have verified the actual drive size, I would just
install service pack 1 or 2 now to see if that fixes it. Slipstreaming can be a pain in the neck. I did that last year, and it took about a dozen walthroughs before
I found one that worked on my system.

 

Er, uh what he said^^^^.....

 

There is nothing hard about slipstreaming, burning it back to CD can be troublesome, but the link I provided is very easy to follow and works well.

 

I kid you not, I tried that exact link and it did not work for me.
(I don't remember which part I had a hard time with though)

I literally spent 2 weeks on this last year. I probably checked out 50 or more
websites on this.
When I finally found a slipstream method that worked for me,
getting it to work with
Nero or Roxio was the problem for me.
As far as the actual slipstreaming procedure, I found two that worked
easy enough but it was rough going on that. In a lot of sites,
people have typed out the integrate line incorrectly. A LOT of sites....

The two I found that worked were
c:\sp2\xpsp2.exe /integrate:c:\xp
C:\winxp-sp2\xpsp2.exe -s:c:\winxp\

 

Btw, I'm a big fan of Paul Thurrott's so it was one of the
first that I tried. And I tried it about a half dozen times.

 

Slipstreaming? Easy stuff, I used google to fine results to get me through it, was great!

 

It's a piece of cake when you get the right walkthrough, for sure.
You were lucky though. I ran into a ton of messed up ones.
And I always copied and pasted the run line so that I wasn't making
the mistake on my end. Made sure to watch upper/lower case etc.

 

I had similar problem with my Hitachi 250 gb sata drive few yrs ago and my OS was XP SP1 (i think). The problem lies within OS - microsoft has an artikle in knowlege database how to modify the registry to accomodate larger drives. It worked for me.
Hope it helps.
Goog luck.

 

Narkoz, you wouldnt happen to have a link would you?

 

I understand that older version of system BIOS may not allow large HDD to be fully utilized. This may be your case.

My current BIOS will only allow me up to 137Gigs, since I'm running two 80GB drives I haven't bothered to update them.

 

Sorry, no link. Try to search MS website.

 

Don't do the reghack. Let me say it again. DON'T DO IT.

Hard drives are not the most stable things to store data on in the first place. The reghack greatly increases the chance for data corruption. The atapi.sys, and other storage drivers are not designed to run 48 bit LBA drives. Better to upgrade the OS, then to force an older driver to do something its not supposed to.