Stolen Gigabytes!!!!

I have had this problem and I have NO CLUE how to remedy it. Everytime I buy a WD drive, it robs me of dozens of gigabytes. I have a 160g hd and windows XP and Vista Ultimate x86 only report 126g. Is there a way to fix this, or is this customary with WD? I could really use my other 38 gigs that they stole form me. I paid for 160g, why o why do I not have them? HELP!!!!! Thanks in advance.

Edit: I am not against doing a reformat if there something or a program that I can do or run to get all the gigs.

drives are always smaller than advertised. HD manufactures use 1,000 MB / GB...1,000KB/MB etc...

Your OS on the other hand uses the correct 1,024 MB/GB etc... , thus showing less capacity then the sticker on the box. The larger the drive, the larger the gap

But not 38 gigabytes on a 160g drive though. I can see on a 1 terabyte drive there could be 38+ gigs gone, but that almost a quarter of my drive gone. So by that theory, a 1 terabyte drive would lose 230g and leave only a 770g drive for the price of a terabyte? If you do the math on the fact that drives are represented by 1000 instead of 1024, I should have lost 6.4g, not 38g.

This seems like when you need atleast SP1 XP to see drives larger than 127gb,

Well there is considerable loss, but yes yours does seem excessive. My 250GB drives end up as 232GB, your 160 should yield around 148-149GB, thats what my WD 160 I had ended up as. I always found that if you take the advertised size and divide by 1.07 it will give you roughly what windows will show you.

JamesXP said:

This seems like when you need atleast SP1 XP to see drives larger than 127gb,

Click to expand...

ah, bang on, I didn't notice in his sig that he was on SP1!

ok go to my computer right click on your drive and hit properties and look at the # i have circled in red if you have a 160GB drive it should read 160,000,000,000+bytes mine i have a 320GB drive

The sticker on the drive says 160g, but this is what the properties says. 137.4g is not what I paid for.

JDXNC said:

ah, bang on, I didn't notice in his sig that he was on SP1!

Click to expand...

Im not sure but dont new installations of vista recognize large drives from square one?

I dont know how to do this in vista, but an you check if the drive is partitioned?
Heres how to create a new partition, viewing them should be similar.
http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_...ate_a_new_Drive_or_Partition_in_Windows_Vista

Microsoft's web site had something on 137GB which i found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098

also found a guy with the same problem here
http://www.wirelessforums.org/alt-comp-hardware/hard-disks-137gb-previously-160gb-29593.html

and he used this to fix it
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

Diddyu said:

Im not sure but dont new installations of vista recognize large drives from square one?

Click to expand...

Wow you're right, I need to learn to read , I noticed SP1 but for some reason assumed it was XP.

Yes vista should

did you install this drive yourself?

what mobo are you using?

old mobos need bios updates to see more then 136G whatever limit, but that is for mobo's made back before 2001 i think...........mnaybe do a bios update?

control panel / administrative tools / computer management - disk management - what does it show there

What does the BIOS see the HDD size as? Which model WD HDD do you have, and is there a capacity limitation jumper on the drive? Download Data Lifeguard Tools from WD, and under "Utilities"--> "Set Hard Drive Size" check these three entries...

Native MAX LBA
Current MAX LBA
Recommended MAX LBA

... a 160GB HDD should show up in Windows at approximately 148-149GB.

WD Data Lifeguard Tools
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

If the OP's original XP installation was not SP1, but SP1 later installed that would make sense as to why you don't see the full capacity(148GB in Windows). Even if the original install disk was XP SP1, it certainly somehow was limited as the original XP release was....weird. The Vista part is strange unless this was an attempted install after XP had created the original partition. If you go into Disk Management do you see Unallocated space? If so you'll only be able to create a second partition with it in XP. A reformat would be necessary to get all the space on one partition, Vista can merge empty partitions though.

redduc900 said:

What does the BIOS see the HDD size as? Which model WD HDD do you have, and is there a capacity limitation jumper on the drive? Download Data Lifeguard Tools from WD, and under "Utilities"--> "Set Hard Drive Size" check these three entries...

Native MAX LBA
Current MAX LBA
Recommended MAX LBA

... a 160GB HDD should show up in Windows at approximately 148-149GB.

WD Data Lifeguard Tools
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

Click to expand...

My bios sees the drive as a 160g drive. The drive is a WD Caviar SE WD1600JD.

@MrGuvernment, I did install the drive myself and it did have XP with SP2 on it. When I installed XP, it was clean then went right to SP2. I didnt install SP1 as I thought it would have been rolled into SP2. My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Rev 2 board that is fairly new and I have the current bios on it.

@Rpkole, I installed that drive restoration tool and it locks up my system and I have to reboot. So that is not a good avenue for me lol. Thanks though.

I am gonna do the Lifegaurds tool now and will let you guys know what is up. Thanks for the help so far I appreciate it alot.

Edit: well the lifegaurd tools doesn't support vista so it wont install at all lol. I might have to do the dos version and see whats up.

Edit #2: Since I dont have a floppy anymore, I thought I could get it load onto my flash drive once I made that bootable. No deal on that too. It wants a physical floppy to load to. So I guess in order to have the full amount I have to put XP back on to run that program? Not gonna happen, I like Vista too much to do that. If anyone else has anything to add I am all ears. Thanks up to this point guys, keep it coming lol.

load xp on a old HD and run the programs

If you installed windows XP without sp2, and then added sp2 after XP was installed, then I believe you just have to extend the partition.

id load up the logical disk manager and make sure you partitioned that right. you might have unpartitioned space or somthing.

Valk said:

id load up the logical disk manager and make sure you partitioned that right. you might have unpartitioned space or somthing.

Click to expand...

Exactly right. Somehow I had a 21g unpartitioned portion on the hard drive. I got Acronis Disk Manager Pro and resized the drive and now I have a 149g hd. Not bad, but still not the 160 I paid for.

I just wanna say thanks to ALL who replied and helped me through the process of elimination to fix this problem. Thats why I love this forum. Good looking out guys.

Codeman05 said:

drives are always smaller than advertised. HD manufactures use 1,000 MB / GB...1,000KB/MB etc...

Your OS on the other hand uses the correct 1,024 MB/GB etc... , thus showing less capacity then the sticker on the box. The larger the drive, the larger the gap

Click to expand...

No, no, no, no, and no. Come on, people, get your act together and quit spreading the lawsuit-feeding lies.

1GB is NOT 1GiB. GB, decimal, 1GB is 1,000MB is 1,000,000KB. GiB, binary, 1GiB is 1,024MiB is 1,048,576KiB. Hard drives are sold in GB. Memory is sold in GiB/MiB and mislabed as GB/MB for some retarded reason. You would think the manufacturers would use the proper terms after the stupid lawsuits. Windows is at fault here for saying GB and showing the quantity in GiB. If you look at the number of bytes you should see 500,000,000,000 bytes on a 500GB drive. Read the following sig, and copy it to yours and assist in getting rid of the darn misinformation. Find my post in the Seagate lawsuit thread here and read the GB vs GiB page on Wikipedia.

henzo said:

Exactly right. Somehow I had a 21g unpartitioned portion on the hard drive. I got Acronis Disk Manager Pro and resized the drive and now I have a 149g hd. Not bad, but still not the 160 I paid for.

Click to expand...

You paid for 160GB, you got 160GB (~149GiB). You did NOT get 160GiB (~172GB). And all related confusion is largely Microsoft's fault for having an operating system that has stated binary sizes with a decimal unit for so many years after a standard defining the two has been made.

In your second post (post #3 in this thread) you did do the math right, but it's not lost, it's a different unit of measurement. If you measure something and it is 2.5 centimers, you haven't lost half of it when you measure it and get 1 inch. It's still the same size, just measured with a different unit. And Microsoft can't seem to figure out that you can't measure something to be 5 meters (GiB) and then say it is 5 inches (GB) and still be the same.