NEW 160gig HD only show 32 gigs Help!!!!

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msmall

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I just bought a 160 GIG internal IDE HD, I'm having major problems with it. I'm currently using a PM G4 867 with 512mb with three other internal IDE HDs totaling 120 gigs. I just recieved my 160gig Internal IDE HD in the mail today. My G4 only reads 32 gigs from the 160 gig hd. I first thought that the company sent the wrong drive, but on the label it said it's a 160 gig hd. The apple utilities program Drive Setup only format's it to 32 gigs. FWB is able to read the drive, but not able to format the drive at all, I get a message that the drive is not compatible with this program. Disk Warrior can't do anything with it. I've been looking on the forum to see if anyone had success mounting a HD greater than 80 gigs. Do I have to upgrade the firmware? Do apple computers only read drive under 80gigs? Please help!!!!

:confused:
 
I just read an article about a user with a 40GB drive that wouldn't show more than 32GB available. His problem was that he had used the jumpers to configure his drive for Slave mode. Apparently with the Maxtor drives on a Mac, he didn't have to use any jumpers at all for slave mode. Once he went in, removed the jumpers, the capacity jumped back up to full size.

I don't know if this applies to you or not, but it might be worth looking at.

Good luck!

Bryan :)
 
Thank you for your replies, I took your advise and removed the jumpers. I was able to mount the drive and format it. The problem now, the drive is now showing me 127 gig instead of 160gigs. Maybe it's a limitation of the Mac OS. Does anyone else have any ideas?:rolleyes:
 
You are aware that formatting a drive does take up some space on the drive, right? I am not sure how much space would be taken up for a 160GB drive, but when I used Windows a 20GB drive was only about 19GB when formattted.
 
I lost about 7GB on my 100GB drive when I formatted it. That's a far cry from the 33GB he's reporting. No answers yet, but I'll keep digging.

Bryan
 
Like I said, I'm not sure how much space would be lost for a 160GB drive. The biggest HD I've ever had is my current one - 80GB. And that was preloaded with OS X and OS 9 and all that stuff, so I don't know the formatted capacity of the drive offhand.
 
Most IDE controllers have a 137GB limit (I believe ATA/133 overcomes this). If the 137GB limit is the marketing form of 137GB (ie, 137,000,000,000) then that comes out to 127GB in computer terms (127*1024*1024*1024).
 
In order to use the full size of your 160gb drive you will need to purchase an Acard ATA133 IDE controller. I ordered a ATA 100+ Controller which also supports ATA133 via firmware update.

After installing the card without the update, the drive formatted to 128gb just like yours, but after I installed the latest firmware update, I was able to format the drive to about 152gb.

I posted this information in the Hard Drive database at XLR8yourmac , so that others will know what is needed to get full functionality of these large hard drives. To find info on this at the web site, just look in the drive database and search for compatibility on 160gb drives.
 
Sorry, doesn't work that way.

You can partition it several times and it still won't make a difference. The OS still knows that it's one drive at a certain capacity. The only way the drive will format to the full amount is to use a fully compliant ATA 133 IDE Controller.

As my sig shows I do have a 160gb drive and that I use Acard's ATA 100+ card, that after a firware update, now supports ATA 133. This allows my 160gb drive to format to 152gb.

I do hope that Apple will use these cards or similar in the next gen desktops. The transfer speeds on these controllers are very nice.
 
The 128 GB addressing limitation can be overcome by using an 48-bit LBA (logical block addressing) IDE controller. Luckily, by upgrading the IDE controller's firmware, it could use this extended addressing, but note that an ATA 133 IDE controller does not immediately imply 48-bit LBA.
I am looking for a good IDE controller to partition my 160 GB Maxtor drive to full capacity, Acard is the brand discussed here, anyone know about others?
Are the newest G4s able to use these drives correctly with the built-in IDE controller?
 
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