seagate, NEED A 200gb PARTITION!!

[chrismatheou]

hi everyone.
my general problem seems to be that i need a 200gb whole partition on my 200gb drive but everytme i clean instal windows i only get a hardrive which is said to be 127gb. in the bios however on my motherboard it says it is a 200gb HDD.
so i know it isnt the bios that is giving it the problem.
i am really stuck on what to do and is there some kind of way to allow me to clean install windows xp on a 200gb partition. please take into acount that it isnt my motherboard that is giving me the problem as it is recognising it, it is a pure software problem.

[OuTpaTienT]

Check with the hard drive's manufacturer. They should have some type of fix for the drive. Here's someone with your exact same problem.

[jman01pa]

Read this, it should fix you up

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...137_winxp.html

[chrismatheou]

ok thanks that helped alot i extended my partition with partition magic 8 and all the un allocated space is now on my C: drive partition.
the only thing is my hardrive in 'my computer' says 186GB not 200GB does anyone know why?? there isnt any more free space on the harddrive when looking at partition maic or the windows disk managing software. the only other partition is that small one which is needed but its only 8mb. so does anyone know where the other 14GB has dissapeared to??

thanks in advance

[John Prophet]

I am guessing that 186 will be the most you can get....that is due to the way that the manufacturers measure "gigabytes"...and also there is some "headroom" lost that cant be used for storage space since it has to be used to hold master boot records and partition tables etc.

I think you have it maxed out with the 186g.

For instance a 40g drive wont give you 40g of storage space..it'll give more like 37g

JP

see here for example---> a review of a 200g western digital drive..they only got 186gb out of it for the same reason

--->"Note: Western Digital counts a meg as 1000K, if you compute it using the more common 1024K, the drive is 186G, not 200G. "

[OuTpaTienT]

That's the correct size.

200/1.024^3 = 186gb

And if you turn it round:
186x1024^3 = 2,000,000,000,000 bytes and so if you go by the 1000 bytes to a kilobyte rule, then you are actually getting 200gb.

[Bizkitkid2001]

It hink its a difference between how windows reads the hard drives size, and how the manufactor reads it. SOmthing like windows reads 1mb as 1000K, but a hard drive manufacter reads 1mb, as 1024K. I'mnot real sure, but its somthing to that extent. Someone will probably come in here later with a full, professional, explanation.

My western digital 200gig shows up as 186gig.


darn, OuT beat me......

[OuTpaTienT]

It's a marketing ploy, that's all. The HD manufacturers know damn well that a megabyte is 1024K but when they use the alternate method of a megabyte = 1000K then it makes their hard drives sound bigger than they actually are. Plain and simple, the manufacturers are liars.

[John Prophet]

I dont know if they meant it from the beginning to be a ploy...I think it is just a problem that has developed over time....because at first, with smaller drives (like the HUGE 3g drives etc of the past)..back then it didnt make a lot of difference but now with 200g drives it does.....and of course they have measured and marketed the drives one way all along and old habits r hard to change.

[Peter M]

It _is_ a distinct marketing ploy. It started out with Quantum calling their 100 "real" megabyte drive P105S, declaring in the fine print that "Quantum defines one megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes".

I've been answering "where's my missing mega/gigabytes" customer inquiries on a daily basis ever since.

With gigabyte sized drives, the "missing matter" has gone up to 7 percent from 5 in the megabytes range, because:

One real binary megabyte = 2^20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes
One real binary gigabyte = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes

So, since your marketing driven "200 GB" drive is actually something like 200,000,000,002 bytes or so, 186 binary gigabytes is spot on.