Hard Disk woes :(

[dave87]

Hye guys,

Got a 160gb Maxtor Diamondmax (9 I think), which has a formatted capacity of 152Gb. It says its full, however when I select all the folders on it and go to properties, it shows them as being 130Gb in size - so I've lost 22gb? Its probably windows being windows, as its been through a couple of computers, but is there anyway to get back the full capacity? - without formatting I might add, untill my 300gb arrives I can't

Cheers

Dave

[mrbanana]

Mmm. I think it might be Windows which is having problems seeing past the 137gb limit.

If you've not already done so go to google, type in:

maxtor big drive enabler

and click on the first link.

Download the 64k file and execute it. Then reboot.

Sorry I can't give you the full link but it's seems to be about a million letters long.

And remember, even though the drive says 160gb you won't get that due to the hard drive manufacturers calling a meg 1000 bytes instead of 1024 bytes

[mrbanana]

Just remembered, if that doesn't work, you can always run a scandisk and check for bad sectors.

[Funkstar]

Is this the boot drive or a slave drive? What file system are you using? If you are using NTFS then windows will reserve a portion of the disk for th MFT (Master File Table) this may account for the disrepancy.

When you get it to count the file and folder sizes are you looking at the aftual total files size, or the total size on disk? The size on disk can be quite a lot larger than this actual binary file size because of clusters, especially if there are a lot of small files (boot drives/volumes are a good example).

Again if this is the boot drive, what about swap file or hibernation file that may be in the root folder but hidden so you can't see then to select and count.

just idea to look into, they may or may not help your problem

[dave87]

Its not the swap file, at least not on this pc, but was in my old pc. Not 22gb tho surely? and if it wasnt seeing past the 137gb limit, then it would register the hdd as a 137 rather than a 152 no?

Its really confused me lol

Dave

[andyjhill]

My 160gb maxtor plus 9 did the same thing bfore it started to die ie loads of bad sectors and only 13 months old .Just out of warranty as well

[arthurleung]

Try cleaning up old system restore files.

[Thorsson]

If you're adding the file sizes together that will be understating the actual amount of disk space taken up by some way A 1kb file doesn't take up 1kb, partcularly with NTFS on large disks. Add together hidden folders, like system restore, and the swap file, you might actually have a full disk.

That's a hell of a pron library you've got there...

[Professor Frink]

You running Windows XP or Windows 2000? If you got Windows XP try downloading service pack 2 and if your running Windows 2000 you will need to do some tweaking for it to support larger hard drives:

The following conditions are necessary for the correct functioning of 48-bit LBA ATAPI support:
• A computer with a 48-bit LBA-compatible Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) installed.
• A computer with a hard disk that has a capacity of greater than 137 gigabytes (GB).
• You must enable the support in the Windows registry by adding or changing the EnableBigLba registry value to 1 in the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
To enable 48-bit LBA large-disk support in the registry:
1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters
3. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0x1
4. Quit Registry Editor.

I did this on my server rig which runs Windows 2000 pro and it worked a dream afterwards.