Formatting new hard drive. ok I've just bought a new 250gb hard drive. Have run fdisk to create a partition, now when in windows when check the drive properties it tells me drive needs formatting. (yes I know this is correct) But when I click yes to format the max allocation it states is 120gb??? Why not 250gb? What have I missed or done wrong?:spangled:
ya man its the samiad!! spelt as shown!! lol He was a legend..... but back to my hard drive!!! Do I just format it and ignore the fact it says 120gb?
I'm assuming you're using XP/2000 for this... Right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage". Go down to "Disk Management" on the left hand side. Your drive should be visible in the pane on the right, and a graphical map should show it's layout like shown: The size below the disk name and number (eg Disk 1) is the total size of the disk (in this example 114.49 GB). What does yours say?
ok that has enlightend things! 120gb is allocated primary partition. The rest well its says 105gb is unallocated! So what do i do? create another partition? I only want it has one big drive.....
Right click on the partition you have created, select "Delete Partition" and follow the steps. This should leave you with a completely blank drive. Then right click on the Unallocated Space and select "Create New Partition"... again follow the steps. Don't forget to format it And then you're laughing
ok cheers for that... One final query.... its in the process of formatting now. and says max partition size is 232gb. As its a 250gb drive any idea where the rest has gone?! lol:spangled:
Thats caused by a difference in the way drives are measured. I have a good example in an old drive I've just found, it's a 10.05GB disk, but only has a useable area of around 9GB. This is because the size of the disk is measured in two different ways: physical and actual. With physical size, 1KB is 1000bytes. 1MB is 1000,000 KB. Actual Size: 1KB is 1024bytes, 1MB is 1024KB. So in that example, the physical size of my disk is 10050000000 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and then by 1024 again to get the size in MB, then by 1000 to get the actual size in GB. You end up with: 9.58GB as the useable size of the disk. Manufacturers tend to quote the larger size as the capacity of the disk (my primary drive has a physical size of 160gb but an actual capacity of 128GB). And thats enough maths from me
Cheers for that lads. I was aware of the measuring difference so expected it to be a bit less than 250gb. But then I thought 18gb in terms of storage aint a little bit!! lol But like you say relatively speaking I guess its not bad, and 232gb to play about with certainly aint!
