Under-reporting Hard Drive Capacity...

I recently bought a couple of drives from ebay, a 20 gig and a 40 gig. When I hooked the first one up as a secondary drive on a Windows system, the drive was reported as having 494 meg capacity. Grrr.

So I hooked up the other drive and lo and behold, it reported as being 494megs as well! I hooked then up by themselves and when booting (with no OS) they reported their proper sizes.

I tried formatting, I can't see any partitions (via Windows explorer), what the heck is going on here? Any tips will be appreciated.

 

what are your specs and operating system?

 

Well, the computer in question is a

Celeron 1.1ghz
512 megs RAM
Windows Server 2003 installed on a 10gig WD Hard drive

I also tried mapping the drive to my Win XP machine through the network, just to see if it would tell me anything different, or if I could somehow diagnose a setting that was causing this, but it was the same.

The drives are a Samsung SP4002H (40 gig) and a Seagate ST320011A (20 gig), both of which are showing up as 494megs. When I disconnected the drive containg my OS, and let the computer boot up with just the blank drive, the start-up screen correctly reported the drive size. I didn't do that with both drives, since I basically got the information that I was going for after testing one. I am figuring that this must, therefore, have something to do with windows, rather than the computer itself (IE BIOS or some such)

 

Additional: I checked in the BIOS setup and the drive sizes are being correctly reported there as well.

 

Aha! Thank-you! You have solved my problem. When I used the utility that you suggested, I could see that there was indeed a partition with no drive letter assigned to it on the drive. I simply have added a drive letter and now I can access it. I assume that the other drive will have the same issue and will test it tonight when i get home from work.

Thank-you both for your help