"Levi" asked
I changed hard drives from a 40 gig to a 160 gig.
Windows dosen't show all of my hard drive just 149 gig.
I updated my bios and it does support the 160 gig. I also
have win xp with sp1 and lba 48 bit. It still dosen't
reconize it just 149 gig. If anyone has this problem or
can give any ideas I would appreacite very much.
Hi
You are not missing any space - although the drive manufacturer could be
clearer. For drive manufacturers 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 Gb, whereas an
Operating System (Windows XP) will regard 1,073,741,824 bytes as 1 Gb. (It's
a decimal V binary thing)
The best way to see this in XP is through 'My Computer', select the
appropriate drive and right-click, select properties... beside 'capacity'
you will see the total number of bytes on your disk and to the right the
number of Gigabytes.
For example, on my 120 Gb drive I have 120,023,252,992 bytes... which is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 111 Gb.
The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as 120
Gb... and, in purely decimal terms, it is - 120,000,000,000 bytes.
The 111 Gb is what the operating system (XP in this case) 'sees'... because
the OS calculates the storage in binary terms... 1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb
as 1 Mb, and 1024 MB as 1 Gb.....
so in my case 120,023,252,992 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes =>
Kilobytes => Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 111.78 Gigabytes as far as the
computer is concerned. (The drive capacity may only show the first 3
digits.)
Neither calculation of the disk size is 'wrong' ...... they are equivalent.
In your case, the drive capacity of 160,000,00,000 bytes (or close to that
value) will be referred to by 'My Computer' as 149Gb after the above
calculation.
Of course, by using the decimal definition drive manufacturers are only
obliged to provide 160,000,000,000 bytes when they claim a drive size of 160
Gigabytes.
Hope that helps
Pete
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