I just got a new 40gb disk for my aging IBM X20. When I set up the disk
using Partition Magic, it will only give me 34.2GB. I want all my
gigabytes! Anyone have any ideas on how to use the whole disk? Thanks - lou

You may have "all your disk space". There are two ways of measuring
disk capacity (megabytes, gigabytes), there are "decimal" megabytes and
gigabytes and there are "binary" megabytes and gigabytes, and they are
significantly different.


Lou Lipnickey wrote:

Avec ses doigts agiles, "Lou Lipnickey" a pianoté sur son clavier le
message:
For IBM HDD, Disk Manager (Ontrack) found free on the IBM web site do the job.
Still available ?
IBM Disk Feature Tool (DFT) may do the job too.
Few weeks ago a thread on the Thinkpad mailing list was on this topic.
A+
--
M.H. Mettre un bémol à l'adresse antispam.

Under the disk "properties" (Win XP), the last set of numbers are:
Capacity: 34,293,252,096 bytes 31.9 GB

I feel gyped either way!
Its the 40GB IBM Travelstar. Any insight?
Lou


Barry Watzman wrote:

"Lou Lipnickey" <lou.lipnickey@pobox.com> wrote in message
newsd8zb.1529$Oe5.783@newsread2.news.atl.earthli nk.net...
Could also be formatted vs. unformatted capacity. I'm not familiar with the
specifics of the Travelstar, but the 15% difference (decimal megabytes) may
be reasonable.

A quick check of my laptop (60GB Toshiba) shows 55.89GB (60,011,642,880
bytes), so my ratio seems to be a little bit better than yours.

- Skip

There have been no widespread barriers since 8 gigs, there is no "power
of 2" rule such as you cite, although there were barriers at 2.1 gigs
and 8 gigs, also at 504 megabytes. These barriers actually did not even
all occur exactly at the "power of 2" points.



Gray Beard wrote:

Lou Lipnickey <lou.lipnickey@pobox.com> wrote in message news:<7Q1zb.1233$Oe5.34@newsread2.news.atl.earthli nk.net>...
I never expect the full capacity labelled on the box anymore. Hard
drive manufacturers don't use the proper amount of bytes per megabyte
and just round it off. 40 gigabytes to them would be 40,000,000,000
bytes when it should actually be something like 42,949,672,960 bytes.

Although it's been awhile since I had to format a drive(gotta love
NTFS/XP/2K), that amount of loss seems a little high. Usually after
file system overhead and the rounded off byte conversion you shouldn't
lose more than a few gigs on a 40 gig drive. I could be wrong
however.. like I said it's been awhile since I've had to do any
formatting.

Perhaps someone with a fresher memory can chime in and let you know
how space you can expect from a 40 gig drive after format.

Other possibilities is the X20 may not support a 40 gig drive, but the
fact that it went over 32 gig shows it most likely can. Maybe run a
diagnostic program from the drive manufacturer and see if it's a
healthy drive and not remapping a couple gigs worth of bad sectors.

-------------------------------------------------------
Chris
http://www.guide-to-laptops.com

Lou Lipnickey wrote:
HD capacity is given in decimal bytes by the manufacturers, but in
binary bytes by the OS. So the 40GB decimal becomes

40GB decimal bytes* (1K binary bytes/1024 decimal bytes)^3 =
40G * .9313 = 37.25G binary bytes
which should be the formatted capacity reported in the right hand column
of the disk properties, with 40,000,000,000 bytes reported in the left
hand column. On my HDs, there is a little bit of difference in the
37.25GB. All are IBM/Hitachi Travelstars and report 37.07, 37.18, 37.30
for whatever reason.

Q