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Something is up with my HD

N

n00bl3t

n00b
Joined
Jun 16, 2005
Messages
9
OK, just to preface, I'm a noob.

I just completed my first build. I have two hard drives, one is Western Digital 74gig Raptor. The other is a Maxtor 250gig. My BIOS recognizes both drives correctly. When I was installing Windows XP, it got to a point where it asked me where I wanted my OS to be installed (and I saw both HDs (unpartitioned) there). My intention was to use the 74 gig hard drive for programs and such and the 250 gig for files. I have no intention to raid or anything.

So I picked the 74 gig and windows proceeded to create a partition and format that hard drive and I successfully installed Windows.

But, how the heck do I get the 250 gig hard drive to show up? There is nothing there in "MY Computer". Also, in the "safely add/remove hardware" icon in the system tray, my Maxtor drive is read there and I can "stop" it. But I obviously don't want to. How do I format my big hard drive so Windows can read it??

My last question is about Windows XP reading my drives. My drives are 74 gigs and 250 gigs. But Windows reads them as 70 gigs and 239 gigs. Is that normal? Is there that much overhead prior to installing the OS? Cause that's 15 gigs it's not reading.

Could some of you brilliant people shed some light for a noob? Just to say, I am pretty proud of myself after my first build. You guys have been a big help every step of the way.
 
Right click on My Computer, choose Manage. When that comes up, choose Disk Management under Storage. You should see both drives, and your 250GB drive won't have a partition on it. Right click on the unpartition space and choose Create Partition (or whatever it says, should be something like that).

And 239GB is right. HD manufacturers are lying assbags, and use 1000 instead of 1024 to figure out drive sizes. (1KB =1000Bytes, 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB=1000MB, etc...)

So GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes like it should be.
 
HD manufacturers are lying assbags, and use 1000 instead of 1024 to figure out drive sizes.
Click to expand...

QFT, and I can't believe that it goes unpunished by the law. A blatant case of misleading advertising.

250 fake GB = 250000000 real KB

250000000 real KB = 238.418579 real GB

Of course the 8MB or so needed to hold partition information is an inevitable and acceptable loss to storage capacity that isn't mentioned. But is the ~4% smaller actual drive size acceptable?
 
Empyrean said:
QFT, and I can't believe that it goes unpunished by the law. A blatant case of misleading advertising.

250 fake GB = 250000000 real KB

250000000 real KB = 238.418579 real GB

Of course the 8MB or so needed to hold partition information is an inevitable and acceptable loss to storage capacity that isn't mentioned. But is the ~4% smaller actual drive size acceptable?
Click to expand...

So I'm installing a maxtor 250 HD and I get the same results as above, 239gig. From what I read above this is normal....WTF??
 
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