Multiple problems w/ hard drive

I have a computer that is four or five years old that I just got running for a friend. It has a 200 GB hard drive (stock, SATA) and the bios is reporting it as 136 GB. I booted into Windows and it reported it as 175 GB. I tried to install Ubuntu and it reported it as an even different size. I ran chkdsk on it and it took about two hours to verify the free space, but it was all still the same. Next, it is setup as the secondary slave drive, with an IDE DVD drive reported as primary master and nothing as primary slave or secondary master. Is that correct? All my experience is with IDE. Another problem with it is occasionally when I reboot or turn off the computer, it no longer has the drive in the BIOS and I have to redetect it in order to boot to Windows. Any help with any of those problems is appreciated.

 

Hi threecoins,

I am struggling to follow completely but just to make sure I am understanding correctly, you are having 2 problems:

1. Inconsistent drive sizes
2. occasional failure to recognise the disk

The first thing to understand is that SATA and IDE are completely independent. IDE has a master and slave because you can have 2 devices connected on the same bus. With SATA you have one drive per bus. As the SATA and IDE buses are separate you will onlt see your CD drive listed as an IDE device and the HD will be listed as a SATA device.

As far as your problems go, they could be signs of a dieing disk. Make sure you have any data on the drive backed up. How old is the disk?

 

I would make the hard drive the primary as that's where the OS lives unless you want to boot from the optical. I'd then go to the drive maker's site and download and run their diagnostic software. You should then have an accurate assessment of the drive. Then we move on.

 

Hi Augiedoggie,

Unless op is talking about two separate drives, I think the Drive is a SATA one, which means there is no primary or secondary.