New 160 GB HD only shows 127 avail.

I just bought a new 169GB Maxtor from Staples a few weeks ago. Thing is it show only 127, I have another 160 by western digital that gives me 152 or something, is my new maxtor trashed? They both have 8mb cache.

Based on googling, I think you have to run a program on the floppy that came with the harddrive to properly "install" it. If you don't have a floppy drive, you can download it off maxtor.com

Something might be wrong, but since they are 2 different companies, it's hard to tell how they round things since the actual ammount of space you get on a HDD is calculated by each different company. Kinda like the whole CPU temp probes each one will give you a different temp, high or low. It depends on how the company does their math.

My WD12000JB gives me 111gigs of actual space, so your WD drive sounds accurate by my readings. Give me a few minutes and i'll try to google some stuff for you.

EDIT: What have you installed on there so far? Try a defrag and basic cleanups, might be some stuff backed up on it.

No, this just sounds like the "my xxx harddrive only shows as 127gb" problem. A quick google will show many cases/results

From personal experiance, check the jumpers on the maxtor. If it is the same model as mine and in the slave configuration, you don't need any jumpers on it at all. Just make sure that you don't have it set up as capacity limited.

You cant have a partition above 127gigs.
Partition it into two drives.

There are a few things to check.

1. Some drives have limit capacity jumper to make the drive work with older bios's. this used to be 8 GB and now is sometimes 127GB (should be 137GB).

2. If you have an older bios with the 137GB barrier then you can try to update the BIOS, add a 3rd party controller card with supporting BIOS from Promise or a company like it, or you can use a DDO like disk manager to basically patch the BIOS at every boot up. Any DDO solution should come from you drive maker.

nealric said:

You cant have a partition above 127gigs.
Partition it into two drives.

Click to expand...

Huey, Dewey and Luey are 3 partitions on my 80 Gig WD. Bat is my 200 gig WD.

You might need to install SP1 to make it work but it's possible.

I'm led to believe there is a 2TB limit on partitions, which can be reached using large RAID arrays.