Large hard drive partitioning

I bought a 100 Gig hard drive. I used the defaults in fdisk partitioning and it appears to have set up 29 gig in C drive. I don't know what I'm to do about the rest of it. I've never had more than 20 Gig on a hard drive so am confused. (often) ha

 

What OS? 98?

 

You may be up against a BIOS limitation. Check in fdisk again to see what the total available drive space is. You should be able to see that in Option 4.

 

Thanks for the replies: I'm using Windows ME. When I put in the floppy and type in fdisk, option 4 only shows 95394 mbytes in C:
It's a 100 Gig with 2 mg ram on board.

Of course, this is after I had already partitioned it. Using option 1.

 

P.S. When I pretend I'm going to reformat c: It then tells me there is 29,857.75m to format.

 

THE NUMBERS GAME

This is long but maybe it will help.

Capacity: The Numbers Game

When it comes to disk capacities, what you see in ads is often not what you get--or at least what you seem to get--on the disk. Understanding why will give you a better understanding of what you're paying for.

Some discrepancies between ads and reality are simple rounding issues. For example, a close look at various vendors' ads may list different capacities for the same brand and model of drive. These differences are usually well under 5 percent--2,559MB compared to 2,500MB, say. That's not much (unless you're down to your last 59MB), but it teaches you that since minor discrepancies appear for even the same drive, you can safely ignore those you encounter when comparison-shopping between different drives.

A more significant difference comes from how you measure capacity--whether in millions of bytes or in megabytes. Run the DOS utility CHKDSK on one unit commonly classified as a 1.5GB drive, for example, and it'll report 1,498,480,640 bytes. Run the FDISK utility, however, and it'll report a seemingly smaller 1,429MB. Since you must run FDISK to install a new hard drive, you may be surprised to see fewer megabytes than you thought you'd paid for.

The difference is purely mathematical. Although most people--and certainly most drive manufacturers--would say that 1,500 million bytes equals 1,500MB, a purist knows that a megabyte is not technically a million bytes, but 1,048,576 bytes (1,024 bytes per kilobyte times 1,024 kilobytes per megabyte). Divide 1,500 million by this value, and you get 1,429MB. The roughly 5 percent difference holds true for any capacity.

Windows 95 makes it easy to see both ways of measuring capacity. From Explorer, when you select a drive and choose File/Properties, the operating system opens a dialog box that displays the used space, the free space, and the total capacity for the drive in both bytes and megabytes.

Virtually all hard drive vendors list capacities in millions of bytes rather than true megabytes, so you can safely make direct comparisons between drives when shopping. The same is generally true for removables, with some exceptions. Panasonic and Toray, for example, claim 650MB for their phase-change (PD) optical disks, which Windows 95 reports as an actual 632MB. That's because the two firms count 1,024 bytes per kilobyte but only 1,000 kilobytes per megabyte.

Finally, be aware that there's a difference between formatted and unformatted drive capacity--though it is now much less of an issue to watch for than it once was. There are also two kinds of formatting, which sometimes causes confusion.

Low-level formatting ties up 15 to 20 percent of a drive's theoretical storage for such overhead as marking tracks and sectors. But when you buy a hard drive, it has already been low-level formatted. In years past, some vendors quoted unformatted capacities as a way to make their drives seem bigger, but today they uniformly quote capacities after low-level formatting.

In addition to low-level formatting, you'll need to format the drive according to your operating system--accomplished by running FDISK with DOS, for example, and FORMAT with Windows 95. But the amount of space that any given operating system's formatting takes up is essentially the same for any drive, and a negligible amount by today's standards. So that difference isn't an issue, either.

 

Thanks for responding. When I click on the properties of C it shows I have about 96 Gig free, so I assume that the fdisk made all of C available under one drive. Hope so anyway because I sure wouldn't know what else to do. Thanks again.