Quake3World

I broke my computer

So I bought a new hard drive and reinstalled XP Pro. I'll eventually transfer across all files on my other 2 drives. Anyway, this is a new 320GB western digital internal IDE drive (my mobo doesn't do sata, at least, not with a Promise controller installed).

What I don't get is, during windows install it shows unpartitioned space as just over 305,000mb.

I formatted and installed XP twice, once with slipstreamed SP2 and once with SP3. 305GB both times. So it's missing 15GB! And now, in 'My Computer' it shows total size as 298GB, and 294GB free space.

The microsoft site says a hard drive not showing full capacity may require a bios update. My bios though, albeit a very old bios file, does in fact show the full capacity of 320,000mb, so I doubt it would still need a bios update would it?

Any ideas?

Actually, I probably just now answered my own questions. Maybe this is the explanation?

http://www.cnet.com.au/forum/desktops/e ... t10020467/

yes, i was gonna say... is this the first time you ever installed a hdd?

MKJ wrote:yes, i was gonna say... is this the first time you ever installed a hdd?

Heh nope, and now that you mention it, my old drive has 123.5GB capacity printed on it, but only ever showed 115GB in windows.

Oh and for anyone remotely interested, the reason I 'broke' my computer was this. I was messing with system restores and when I settled on one I was happy with, I reinstalled AVG, but an older unsupported version 7, because the 8.5 setup file wasn't on the restore. It kept coming up with tons of virus alerts and I kept pressing heal without really looking at what I was healing. Not sure why it kept alerting me but I couldn't start any programs after that, kept saying psapi.dll missing and winsock and some others. So I rebooted and ended up in an endless reboot cycle, never being able to get past the xp boot screen into the desktop before it went back to the start screen again. None of the safe mode commands worked, not even last known good configuration; I could not get into safe mode. And my final hope was GoBack. Goback has gotten me out of trouble in the past, but this time it said there were no times to revert to. So I was screwed. Oh well, at least I have a new and bigger drive now. I just have to set a bunch of things up again, such as email, msn, and transfer about 150GB of files across from the old drives Will the Files and Transfer Settings Wizard be of use here or should I just do a copy and paste from a hard drive to this drive?

I just assumed that the missing area was for the install disc that comes with the hard drives. I read a bit of that link, but still didn't see a valid explanation of why the two different measurement formats. Do you see any purpose to this system?

Also. Your situation just topped my recent external hd fiasco.

Peenyuh wrote: Do you see any purpose to this system?

Nope, it's all double dutch to me.

Peenyuh wrote:
Also. Your situation just topped my recent external hd fiasco.

Yes, I am not here to be outdone by anyone. When I break my computer, I like to do it in style. I am skilled enough to completely fuck up my computer better than anyone. I have the x factor

DRuM wrote:Heh nope, and now that you mention it, my old drive has 123.5GB capacity printed on it, but only ever showed 115GB in windows.

That's because disk manufacturers use 1000 bytes / kilo, but operating systems report 1024 bytes / kilo. Happens at the mega and giga notations too.

So the HD manufacturer says 123.5 GB which, to them is 123.5 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 123500000 bytes. Divide by 1024 three times and you get 115 GB, which is what the OS reports. You are still storing 123.5 billion bytes, just the notation is screwy and confusing.

Fender wrote:

DRuM wrote:Heh nope, and now that you mention it, my old drive has 123.5GB capacity printed on it, but only ever showed 115GB in windows.

That's because disk manufacturers use 1000 bytes / kilo, but operating systems report 1024 bytes / kilo. Happens at the mega and giga notations too.

So the HD manufacturer says 123.5 GB which, to them is 123.5 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 123500000 bytes. Divide by 1024 three times and you get 115 GB, which is what the OS reports. You are still storing 123.5 billion bytes, just the notation is screwy and confusing.

Thanks, yeah, that makes sense.

maybe i should have read the entire thread first
your link in the 2nd post said pretty much the same thing