Disappearing HD Space

A

alphap1us

Registered
I bought an 160GB IDE Hard Drive on eBay the other day and when I viewed it using disk copy (latest Panther seed), it said that the capacity was around 120 GB while Available was 157GB under Windows NT format. This seemed odd to me but odder still when I re-formatted it to OS X Extended, the total available went back to 120GB. I have opened up the hard drive and sure enough it says 160 GB on it. What gives? Surely re-formatting with HFS+ didn't take a quarter of the file system. And why was the availabe space greater than the capacity?
 
While formatting the drive does take away some space, it could also be that some of the blocks are bad. When you formatted for OSX, it blocked out the bad sections giving you only 120 GB usable.

Using Disk Utility, scan it and see what it comes up with.
 
Thanks, Cheryl but I don't think that could be the problem. For one I would like to think that 40G=one quarter of the hard drive would not go bad. I do not like to think that because of any evidence, but becasue it helps me sleep at night. Also Disk utility (under the latest Panther build) scans for less than a minute and says everythign looks fine. Sheesh. Any other ideas?
 
I think the bigger the hard drive the more you lose. I think your loss is relative. Remember especially in macs the hard drive size is calculated differently.

Sorry i don't have specifics though.
 
According to what? Sure, some hard disk space is taken up by the directory, but I have never in 12 years heard of a 40 GB directory.

Can you boot into OS 9? If so, do so and see what the hard drive's size is. If it's accurate, you may have a problem reading the size in X or something.
 
Depends on what machine you have. If it has a ATA66, it will only recognize up to 127GB.
 
Only the most recent Macs (MDD G4s or X-serves) will fully use that 160GB internally, or you can add an ATA-6 capable IDE controller card. Even PCs require that ATA-6 capability (plus W2K or XP with recent SP) for Hard drives over 137 GB of advertised space. Showing the space available in a utility does not prove that you can utilize that space.
 
I am not sure I understood the last two posts. The HD is a Western Digital with "Ultra/ATA 100" which is in a USB 2.0 enclosure, connected to the USB port of my iBook 800. Is the iBook not capable of recognzing the extra space or is it the USB or ATA interface?
 
Do you know what the serial bus of your iBook is? If it uses ATA 66, then you can only use up to 127 GB of space, I believe. How old is the iBook?
 
It is a Dual USB/Ice iBook from the revision late in 2002. Does the USB have to go throught the serial bus? Would switching to a FireWire 400 enclosure solve/help the problem?
 
Yes, a FireWire enclosure would help, if only to speed up access to the drive, and many fireWire enclosures will allow the full use of the 160GB drive. Of course, you know that your iBook does not support USB 2.0, and USB 1.1 is draggy, super slow (example, even assuming the drive could make theoretical maximum throughput of 12 Mbits/sec, it would take more than 11 minutes to copy 1 GByte. fireWire 400 (again, assuming max throughput) would copy to same 1 GB in 20 Seconds.
 
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